Persian Typographical Error Type Detection Using Deep Neural Networks on Algorithmically-Generated Misspellings

Abstract: Spelling correction is a remarkable challenge in the field of natural language processing. The objective of spelling correction tasks is to recognize and rectify spelling errors automatically. The development of applications that can effectually diagnose and correct Persian spelling and grammatical errors has become more important in order to improve the quality of Persian text. The Typographical Error Type Detection in Persian is a relatively understudied area. Therefore, this paper presents a compelling approach for detecting typographical errors in Persian texts. Our work includes the presentation of a publicly available dataset called FarsTypo, which comprises 3.4 million words arranged in chronological order and tagged with their corresponding part-of-speech. These words cover a wide range of topics and linguistic styles. We develop an algorithm designed to apply Persian-specific errors to a scalable portion of these words, resulting in a parallel dataset of correct and incorrect words. By leveraging FarsTypo, we establish a strong foundation and conduct a thorough comparison of various methodologies employing different architectures. Additionally, we introduce a groundbreaking Deep Sequential Neural Network that utilizes both word and character embeddings, along with bidirectional LSTM layers, for token classification aimed at detecting typographical errors across 51 distinct classes. Our approach is contrasted with highly advanced industrial systems that, unlike this study, have been developed using a diverse range of resources. The outcomes of our final method proved to be highly competitive, achieving an accuracy of 97.62%, precision of 98.83%, recall of 98.61%, and surpassing others in terms of speed.