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Real-time automatic insertion of accents in French text

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 July 2001

MICHEL SIMARD
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de recherche appliquée en linguistique informatique (RALI), Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada; e-mail: simardm@iro.UMontreal.CA,deslaura@iro.UMontreal.CA
ALEXANDRE DESLAURIERS
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de recherche appliquée en linguistique informatique (RALI), Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada; e-mail: simardm@iro.UMontreal.CA,deslaura@iro.UMontreal.CA

Abstract

Automatic Accent Insertion (AAI) is the problem of re-inserting accents (diacritics) into a text where they are missing. Unaccented French texts are still quite common in electronic media, as a result of a long history of character encoding problems and the lack of well-established conventions for typing accented characters on computer keyboards. An AAI method for French is presented, based on a statistical language model. Next, it is shown how this AAI method can be used to do real-time accent insertions within a word processing environment, making it possible to type in French without having to type accents. Various mechanisms are proposed to improve the performance of real-time AAI, by exploiting online corrections made by the user. Experiments show that, on average, such a system produces less than one accentuation error for every 200 words typed.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 2001 Cambridge University Press

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