Design and Implementation of a Spell Checker for Hausa Language (Étude et conception d'un correcteur orthographique pour la langue haoussa) [in French]

In this paper, we have designed, implemented and tested a spell corrector for the Hausa language which is the second most spoken language in Africa and do not yet have processing tools. This study is a contribution to the automatic processing of the Hausa language. We used existing techniques for other languages and adapted them to the special case of the Hausa language. The corrector designed operates essentially on Mijinguini’s dictionary and characteristics of the Hausa alphabet. After a careful study of the existing spell checking and correcting techniques and the state of art in the computerization o f the Hausa language, we opted for the data structures trie and hash table to represent the dictionary. We used the edit distance and the specificities of the Hausa alphabet to detect and correct spelling errors. The implementation of the spell corrector has been made on a special editor developed for that purpose (LyTexEditor) but also as an extension (add-on) for OpenOffice.org. A comparison was made on the performance of the two data structures used. Mots-clés: Traitement automatique des langues, informatisation du haoussa, langues africaines, correcteur orthographique.