Spelling and Grammar Correction for Danish in SCARRIE

This paper reports on work carried out to develop a spelling and grammar corrector for Dan-ish, addressing in particular the issue of how a form of shallow parsing is combined with error detection and correction for the treatment of context-dependent spelling errors. The syntactic grammar for Danish used by the system has been developed with the aim of dealing with the most frequent error types found in a parallel corpus of unedited and proofread texts specifically collected by the project's end users. By focussing on certain grammatical constructions and certain error types, it has been possible to exploit the linguistic 'intelligence' provided by syntactic parsing and yet keep the system robust and efficient. The system described is thus superior to other existing spelling checkers for Danish in its ability to deal with context-dependent errors. 1 Introduction In her much-quoted and still relevant review of technologies for automatic word correction (Ku-kich, 1992), Kukich observes that "research in context-dependent spelling correction is in its infancy" (p. 429), and that the task of treating context-dependent errors is still an elusive one due to the complexity of the linguistic knowledge often necessary to analyse the context in sufficient depth to find and correct such errors. But progress in parsing technology and the growing speed of computers seem to have made the task less of a chimera. The '90s have in fact seen a renewed interest in grammar checking, and proposals have been made for systems covering English (Bernth, 1997) and other languages such as Italian (Bolioli et al.