Towards a Spell Checker for Zamboanga Chavacano Orthography

Abstract

Zamboanga Chabacano (ZC) is the most vibrant variety of Philippine Creole Spanish, with over 400,000 native speakers in the Philippines (as of 2010). Following its introduction as a subject and a medium of instruction in the public schools of Zamboanga City from Grade 1 to 3 in 2012, an official orthography for this variety - the so-called ``Zamboanga Chavacano Orthography'' - has been approved in 2014. Its complexity, however, is a barrier to most speakers, since it does not necessarily reflect the particular phonetic evolution in ZC, but favours etymology instead. The distance between the correct spelling and the different spelling variations is often so great that delivering acceptable performance with the current de facto spell checking technologies may be challenging. The goals of this research have been to propose i) a spelling error taxonomy for ZC, formalised as an ontology and ii) an adaptive spell checking approach using Character-Based Statistical Machine Translation to correct spelling errors in ZC. Our results show that this approach is suitable for the goals mentioned and that it could be combined with other current spell checking technologies to achieve even higher performance.

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