A Double Metaphone Encoding for Bangla and its Application in Spelling Checker

Abstract

We present a Double Metaphone encoding for Bangla that can be used by spelling checkers to improve the quality of suggestions for misspelled words. The complex rules of Bangla spelling present a significant challenge in producing suggestions for a misspelled word when employing the traditional edit-distance methods; one must take phonetic similarity into account for the suggested alternatives to be reasonably accurate. We propose a Double Metaphone encoding for Bangla, taking into account the various context-sensitive rules, including those involving the large repertoire of consonant clusters in Bangla, and present a comparison with the traditional edit-distance based methods in producing suggestions for misspelled words.