Deep Learning for Arabic Error Detection and Correction

Abstract

Research on tools for automating the proofreading of Arabic text has received much attention in recent years. There is an increasing demand for applications that can detect and correct Arabic spelling and grammatical errors to improve the quality of Arabic text content and application input. Our review of previous studies indicates that few Arabic spell-checking research efforts appropriately address the detection and correction of ill-formed words that do not conform to the Arabic morphology system. Even fewer systems address the detection and correction of erroneous well-formed Arabic words that are either contextually or semantically inconsistent within the text. We introduce an approach that investigates employing deep neural network technology for error detection in Arabic text. We have developed a systematic framework for spelling and grammar error detection, as well as correction at the word level, based on a bidirectional long short-term memory mechanism and word embedding, in which a polynomial network classifier is at the top of the system. To get conclusive results, we have developed the most significant gold standard annotated corpus to date, containing 15 million fully inflected Arabic words. The data were collected from diverse text sources and genres, in which every erroneous and ill-formed word has been annotated, validated, and manually revised by Arabic specialists. This valuable asset is available for the Arabic natural language processing research community. The experimental results confirm that our proposed system significantly outperforms the performance of Microsoft Word 2013 and Open Office Ayaspell 3.4, which have been used in the literature for evaluating similar research.