Malayalam spell checker using N-gram method

Abstract

Spell checker is a software tool which can detect incorrectly spelled words in a text document. Developing spell checker for a morphologically rich language like Malayalam is really tedious task. This paper mainly discusses about the construction of spell checker for Malayalam language. Since in Malayalam, many words can be derived from root word, it will be impossible to include all the words in a lexicon. So a hybrid method of different techniques can improve the performance of a spell checker. The method explained is an n-gram based approach and which will be inexpensive to construct without deep linguistic knowledge. Along with n gram, a Minimum edit distance algorithm is also added to detect the errors due to addition, deletion, or interchange of letters in a word. This will improve the efficiency of the spell checker. This approach will be useful when less linguistic resources are available for Malayalam language. And also the performance analysis is done with an existing method of spell checking in Malayalam language.