Towards automatic spell checking for Arabic

Arabic’s rich morphology (word construction) and complex orthography (writing system) present unique challenges for automatic spell checking. An Arabic checker attempts to find a dictionary word that might be the correct spelling of the misspelled or misrecognized word In this paper, we report our attempt in developing an Arabic spelling checker program for solving this problem. Our approach is heuristic and involves developing an Arabic morphological analyzer, techniques of spelling checking and spelling correction, and efficient methods of lexicon operations. The developed Arabic spell checker is able to recognize common spelling errors for standard Arabic and Egyptian dialects.