Non-word error detection in current South African spellcheckers

Abstract

The main objective of this article is to investigate the effectiveness of the current South African spellcheckers built by the authors of this article. To this end translations of the same text, namely the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, will be spellchecked, and the performances compared across various sample languages. The spellcheckers themselves will be engaged in layers, so as to monitor the effect of the number of items in the spellchecker lexica. This innovative research will be preceded by a discussion of HLT (Human Language Technologies) in South Africa and the authors' philosophy in this regard, a brief theoretical conspectus of spellcheckers, a presentation of the methodology employed to create the spellcheckers, an in-depth study on how to deal with diacritics in spellcheckers, and a walkthrough of standard spelling and grammar checking functions — all with specific reference to the African languages.