Khmer Spell Checker

Khmer is the official language of Cambodia. It is a complex language. Similar to Chinese, Japanese and Thai, Khmer words are written without spaces or other word delimiters. This is a major challenge in spell checking Khmer since there is no simple way to determine word boundaries. However, it is feasible to spell check Khmer. The process of spell checking Khmer is different from the spell checking process in other languages that have word delimiters like English. In Khmer, words are constructed from root words that are made up of consonantal clusters, which can be misspelled. In order to do the spell checking, first we need to find the approximate clusters of each input clusters. We then give the possible sequences of the consonantal clusters to a hidden Markov model. The model will give the score of every sequence of consonantal clusters. Based the possible sequences and their scores, we know the word boundaries, whether or not a word is correctly spelled and some alternative words if it is misspelled.