Kannada Spell Checker with Sandhi Splitter

Abstract: Spelling errors are introduced in text either during typing, or when the user does not know the correct phoneme or grapheme. If a language contains complex words like sandhi where two or more morphemes join based on some rules, spell checking becomes very tedious. In such situations, having a spell checker with sandhi splitter which alerts the user by flagging the errors and providing suggestions is very useful. A novel algorithm of sandhi splitting is proposed in this paper. The sandhi splitter can split about 7000 most common sandhi words in Kannada language used as test samples. The sandhi splitter was integrated with a Kannada spell checker and a mechanism for generating suggestions was added. A comprehensive, platform independent, standalone spell checker with sandhi splitter application software was thus developed and tested extensively for its efficiency and correctness. A comparative analysis of this spell checker with sandhi splitter was made and results concluded that the Kannada spell checker with sandhi splitter has an improved performance. It is twice as fast, 200 times more space efficient, and it is 90% accurate in case of complex nouns and 50% accurate for complex verbs. Such a spell checker with sandhi splitter will be of foremost significance in machine translation systems, voice processing, etc. This is the first sandhi splitter in Kannada and the advantage of the novel algorithm is that, it can be extended to all Indian languages.