A novel approach for ranking spelling error corrections for Urdu

This paper presents a scheme for ranking of spelling error corrections for Urdu. Conventionally spell-checking techniques do not provide any explicit ranking mechanism. Ranking is either implicit in the correction algorithm or corrections are not ranked at all. The research presented in this paper shows that for Urdu, phonetic similarity between the corrections and the erroneous word can serve as a useful parameter for ranking the corrections. This combined with a new technique Shapex that uses visual similarity of characters for ranking gives an improvement of 23% in the accuracy of the one-best match compared to the result obtained when the ranking is done on the basis of word frequencies only.