In this work, we address the problem of spelling correction in the Arabic
language utilizing the new corpus provided by QALB (Qatar Arabic Language Bank)
project which is an annotated corpus of sentences with errors and their
corrections. The corpus contains edit, add before, split, merge, add after,
move and other error types. We are concerned with the first four error types as
they contribute more than 90% of the spelling errors in the corpus. The
proposed system has many models to address each error type on its own and then
integrating all the models to provide an efficient and robust system that
achieves an overall recall of 0.59, precision of 0.58 and F1 score of 0.58
including all the error types on the development set. Our system participated
in the QALB 2014 shared task "Automatic Arabic Error Correction" and achieved
an F1 score of 0.6, earning the sixth place out of nine participants.Comment: System description paper that is submitted in the EMNLP 2014
conference shared task "Automatic Arabic Error Correction" (Mohit et al.,
2014) in the Arabic NLP workshop. 6 page
