Spelling Correction for Dialectal Arabic Dictionary Lookup

摘要

The "Did You Mean... ?" system, described in this article, is a spelling corrector for Arabic that is designed specifically for L2 learners of dialectal Arabic in the context of dictionary lookup. The authors use an orthographic density metric to motivate the need for a finer-grained ranking method for candidate words than unweighted Levenshtein edit distance. The Did You Mean... ? architecture is described, and the authors show that mean reciprocal rank can be improved by tuning operation weights according to sound confusions, and by anticipating likely spelling variants.