Solthiruthi – A Multi-pass spell checker for Tamil language (Draft-1)
Author: Muthiah Annamalai, edited: April, 21, 2015

https://www.flickr.com/photos/tfxc/16609255733/in/ | CC by ND NC 2.0 )
Introduction
Following compiler construction theory, we may write a multi-pass spell checker for Tamil language. Tamil falls under a linguistic classification as a agglutinative language, and has a phonetic script.
In this article I will present a conceptual framework, a proposal, for writing a multi-pass solthiruthi spell-checker. This effort is variation on theme of other spell checkers for Tamil created by projects myspell, hunspell, navi/vani, and languagetool respectively.
N.B.: I invite interested individuals to contribute to this document, and collaborate with me, under usual open-source credit/attribution terms.
Problem
- Given a Tamil text, urai, we want to find out all spelling mistakes in the text
- For words which are in error, we want to further provide alternatives
- For Tamil language we have to apply santhi rules, puranchi vithigal, from grammar.
- We also would like to provide context sensitive help like A.I.
Solution Overview
I propose a multi-pass spell checker comprised of N-levels. Each level upto the penunltimate (Level N-1) will continue to refine the words which are found in error; we call this analysis levels. The final level will form the suggestions for the words in error; we call this synthesis level. Such an algorithm can be built from 2-Level and upwards in the complexity.
We use a dictionary of valid Tamil words, to validate the Incoming text is split into the form of words, and each word goes through the N-steps.
Typical levels for analysis include, but not limited to,
- Dictionary based white-list analysis for incorrectly spelled words
- Morphological analysis via stemmer – this is a requirement of agglutinative languages
- Clean up proper nouns words, peyarechcham, using names of places, people, things
- Bayesian classification of errors using bigram, trigram, N-gram letter probabilities
- Context sensitive word suggestion by Bayesian classification using N-gram word probabilities
- Keyboard models, Bamini, Tamil99, Anjal, layouts and common misspellings in these
- Edit-distance based analysis for mistyped words
- Santhi checker
- Punarchi checker
- Detect transliterated English words in Tamil and ignore
Synthesis step is usually made from the following,
- Norvig algorithm for spelling suggestions modified for Tamil arichuvadi
- For Tamil we need to combine Santhi, and Punarchi rule based pruning of suggestions
Pizhai : 2-Level spell checker
Pizhai spell checker algorithm uses the 2 analysis steps of whitelisted dictionary and the bigram/trigram letter analysis to flag erroneous words. Finally we suggest word alternates to the user during synthesis.
Solthiruthi : 3-Level spell checker
Solthiruthi spell checker algorithm uses the 3 analysis steps of whitelisted dictionary and the bigram/trigram letter analysis to flag erroneous words, and includes a stemmer. Finally we suggest word alternates to the user during synthesis.
Code
All of these ideas can be implemented in Python using open-tamil project, today. We welcome enthusiastic contributors – linguists, language enthusiasts and developers.
Good plan.
nice plan
நல்ல முயற்சி.
எம் நண்பர் ஒருவர் JAVAவில் இது சார்ந்து சில வேலைகள் பண்ணி இருக்கிறார் .
https://javas2-jcscdc.java.us2.oraclecloudapps.com/tamil/index.html