A common feature of text input tools is spell checking. It exists in search engines, email clients and of course in word processors like Microsoft Word. By having a spell checker when you are typing you can be more efficient than if you had to check the spelling with a separate proofing tool. Spell checking is a common request by the users of the room planning software CET Designer which is developed by Configura. In this thesis Windows Spell Checking API is evaluated and compared to alternative spell checkers. A prototype of an integrated spell checker in CET Designer text tool is then implemented with Windows Spell Checking API.

Orthography Standardization in Arabic Dialects Abstract Christian Cayralat1 1 Charles University Spontaneous orthography in Arabic dialects poses one of the biggest ob- stacles in the way of Dialectal Arabic NLP applications. As the Arab world enjoys a wide array of these widely spoken and recently written, non-standard, low-resource varieties, this thesis presents a detailed account of this relatively overlooked phenomenon. It sets out to show that continuously creating addi- tional noise-free, manually standardized corpora of Dialectal Arabic does not free us from the shackles of non-standard (spontaneous) orthography. Because real-world data will most often come in a noisy format, it also investigates ways to ease the amount of noise in textual data. As a proof of concept, we restrict ourselves to one of the dialectal varieties, namely, Lebanese Arabic. It also strives to gain a better understanding of the nature of the noise and its distri- bution. All of this is done by leveraging various spelling correction and morpho- logical tagging neural architectures in a multi-task setting, and by annotating a Lebanese Arabic corpus for spontaneous orthography standardization, and morphological segmentation and tagging, among other features. Additionally, a detailed taxonomy of spelling inconsistencies for...

The goal of this thesis is to explore the area of natural language correction and to design and implement neural network models for a range of tasks ranging from general grammar correction to the specific task of diacritization. The thesis opens with a description of existing approaches to natural language correction. Existing datasets are reviewed and two new datasets are introduced: a manually annotated dataset for grammatical error correction based on CzeSL (Czech as a Second Language) and an automatically created spelling correction dataset. The main part of the thesis then presents design and implementation of three models, and evaluates them on several natural language correction datasets. In comparison to existing statistical systems, the proposed models learn all knowledge from training data; therefore, they do not require an error model or a candidate generation mechanism to be manually set, neither they need any additional language information such as a part of speech tags. Our models significantly outperform existing systems on the diacritization task. Considering the spelling and basic grammar correction tasks for Czech, our models achieve the best results for two out of the three datasets. Finally, considering the general grammatical correction for English, our models achieve results which are...

The aim of this dissertation is to provide a unified treatment of various spell checkers and correctors. Firstly, the spell checking and correcting problems are formally described in mathematics in order to provide a better understanding of these tasks. An approach that is similar to the way in which denotational semantics used to describe programming languages is adopted. Secondly, the various attributes of existing spell checking and correcting techniques are discussed. Extensive studies on selected spell checking/correcting algorithms and packages are then performed. Lastly, an empirical investigation of various spell checking/correcting packages is presented. It provides a comparison and suggests a classification of these packages in terms of their functionalities, implementation strategies, and performance. The investigation was conducted on packages for spell checking and correcting in English as well as in Northern Sotho and Chinese. The classification provides a unified presentation of the strengths and weaknesses of the techniques studied in the research. The findings provide a better understanding of these techniques in order to assist in improving some existing spell checking/correcting applications and future spell checking/correcting package designs and implementations. / Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Computer Science / unrestricted