Indian scientists develop new spell-check programme

CALCUTTA, JUNE 11: For computer professionals with a not so perfect grip on spellings, there is lesser reason to brood now, thanks to a p...

CALCUTTA, JUNE 11: For computer professionals with a not so perfect grip on spellings, there is lesser reason to brood now, thanks to a powerful spell-checker designed by scientists at the Indian Statistical Institute ISI here.

The automatic spelling correction and morphological analyser developed by ISI8217;s computer vision and pattern recognition unit uses robust statistical analysis of human error in writing and typing text.

Initially designed to screen only Bengali text, the analyser can be altered to suit other language specifications also, head of the unit and research team Prof S C Kundu told PTI.

The spell-checker depends on dictionary search where a conventional dictionary, a reversed dictionary and an intermediately ordered dictionary are used. This is the first spell-checker developed with so many interesting user-friendly features, Prof Kundu said.

quot;The technique can not only detect error but also locate the position where it has occurred, and in some cases, can identify the type insertion, deletion or substitution of the error,quot; he said.

Besides, it leads the user to a small subset of suggested correction alternatives, which is guaranteed to include the intended word if the error occurs at two or less character position of the erroneous string, Prof Kundu explained.

The analyser has added functions like word level parsing meaning it can automatically segment a word into its root and suffix and detect their syntactic and semantic properties.

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quot;We have already completed the project on automatic morphological analysis and parsing of Bengali verbs 8211; both single and compound forms. Work is in progress for nouns and pronouns,quot; Prof Kundu said.

The verb parser provides myriad facilities to the user like meaning, tense, person, honorification, causation and other information at the click of a button.

Multiple valid parses are also automatically found by the software, Prof Kundu said.

Apart from the spell-checker, the team has formulated a process of machine translation and speech synthesis on a simple rule based approach.

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quot;We translated weather reports from Hindi to Bengali language with high quality machine translation on a limited vocabulary text. Currently our team is considering the reverse 8211; from Bengali to Hindi,quot; Prof Kundu said adding this was more difficult since Bengali nouns and verbs do not have gender information while Hindi ones do.

The researchers have also taken up a project to synthesise Malayalam speech sounds in collaboration with Trivandrum-based International School of Dravidian Studies, Prof Kundu said.