A Simple Spanish Part of Speech Tagger for Detection and Correction of Accentuation Error

One of the most frequent kind of typographic errors specific to Spanish is connected with accentuation, namely, with omission of an obligatory stress mark or insertion of a superfluous one. If such an error transforms one word to another existing one, the latter cannot be detected by usual spell-checkers, since some context analysis is necessary. A simple procedure is proposed for this task. It relies on (1) some simple heuristics that determine linear context and (2) on a small list of pairs of words that differ only in accentuation mark. This idea is applied to numerous nouns or adjectives like número that pass to quasi-homonymous personal verb forms if they lose their stress marks.