Hybrid Tamil spell checker with combined character splitting

Summary Spell checker is the application, which helps in finding the spelling errors in a given text. Applications like word processors, mails, search engines, speech recognition and social media forums need these kinds of spell checking tools to increase the correctness of the system. Spell checking is completely implemented in languages such as English, French, and Chinese. But as far as Indian regional languages is concerned, very few works have been carried out, that too partially. Tamil is one such Indian regional language, which requires a fully implemented spell checking application as many people started using this language in social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Spelling errors fall on different categories in Tamil language, which involves Sandhi errors, Homophone errors (Mayangoli), and misspelt words error. To tackle all these errors, a new ensemble approach is proposed in this paper. The proposed approach consists of Levenshtein's edit distance algorithm, rule‐based algorithm, Soundex algorithm along with LSTM (Long Short Term Memory) model. We have used a special feature called combine character splitting of Tamil alphabets for feeding the LSTM model to improve the performance of the system. Proposed system produced an accuracy of 95.67%, which is approved by the Tamil scholar.