Beqi: Revitalize the Senegalese Wolof Language with a Robust Spelling Corrector

Abstract

The progress of Natural Language Processing (NLP), although fast in recent years, is not at the same pace for all languages. African languages in particular are still behind and lack automatic processing tools. Some of these tools are very important for the development of these languages but also have an important role in many NLP applications. This is particularly the case for automatic spell checkers. Several approaches have been studied to address this task and the one modeling spelling correction as a translation task from misspelled (noisy) text to well-spelled (correct) text shows promising results. However, this approach requires a parallel corpus of noisy data on the one hand and correct data on the other hand, whereas Wolof is a low-resource language and does not have such a corpus. In this paper, we present a way to address the constraint related to the lack of data by generating synthetic data and we present sequence-to-sequence models using Deep Learning for spelling correction in Wolof. We evaluated these models in three different scenarios depending on the subwording method applied to the data and showed that the latter had a significant impact on the performance of the models, which opens the way for future research in Wolof spelling correction.