A New Error Annotation for Dyslexic texts in Arabic

Abstract

This paper aims to develop a new classification of errors made in Arabic by those suffering from dyslexia to be used in the annotation of the Arabic dyslexia corpus (BDAC). The dyslexic error classification for Arabic texts (DECA) comprises a list of spelling errors extracted from previous studies and a collection of texts written by people with dyslexia that can provide a framework to help analyse specific errors committed by dyslexic writers. The classification comprises 37 types of errors, grouped into nine categories. The paper also discusses building a corpus of dyslexic Arabic texts that uses the error annotation scheme and provides an analysis of the errors that were found in the texts.

Automatic Correction of Arabic Dyslexic Text

“…Several studies have characterised and classified spelling errors in Arabic [29,30], and some studies have also looked at dyslexic spelling errors in Arabic [9][10][11].…”

“…In order to propose an efficient spelling correction for dyslexic Arabic text, it is necessary to study and categorize the error patterns of dyslexia. Such a study was the focus of the authors' previous work [11]. Following this study, creating a prototype of an automatic spelling correction system called Sahah described in this paper was undertaken.…”

“…The second stage (Stage 2) is a detection and correction stage that contains three further sub-stages: a sub-stage for error detection using a dictionary and two sub-stages for correction. The first sub-stage (2a) uses a statistical model to correct dyslexic errors according to their context based on the dyslexic error classification for Arabic texts (DECA) [11]. The second sub-stage (2b) is for error detection and uses an AraComLexdictionary [29].…”

“…To perform the experiment, 10% of the Bangor Dyslexic Arabic Corpus (BDAC), created by Alamri and Teahan [11,43], was used. The size of the BDAC is 28,203 words collected from Saudi Arabian schools, forms and text provided by parents.…”

“…Diacritics of this kind are small symbols that are placed above or below letters, the purpose being to indicate to the reader how the short vowels in certain words should be pronounced [8]; for example, "i + n" indicates the kasratain short vowel; for example, in the word " " [E: "a ball" B: "krpK" R: "krtin"] (the syntax used here is as follows: "Arabic text" [E: "English translation" B: "Buckwalter transliteration" R: "ALA-LCRomanization"]). The literature indicates that dyslexic individuals often write diacritical marks as letters [9][10][11] as in " " [B: "krptn" R: "krttn"] instead of " ". Additionally, they also tend to write text from left to right instead of right to left used when writing in Arabic [12].…”