OPEN SOURCE KISWAHILI SPELL CHECKER (SW-TZ)

Abstract

Different English software products are localized into many native languages spokenaround the world, the most popular software products localized so far are word processingsoftware and web browsers. The effort has begun to localize these software products inKiswahili language which is widely spoken in Tanzania, East and Central Africa. Kiswahiliis an official language of Tanzania, and is a national language in Uganda and Kenya. Tomake these software products useful to Kiswahili speaking community particularly inTanzania a new Kiswahili spell checker has been developed and, it uses most of theKiswahili words spoken in Tanzania and its locale identity is sw-TZ for OpenOffice.organd Mozilla Firefox while Kiswahili spoken in Kenya has a locale identity sw-KE which iscommon for Microsoft office products. It was developed due to the shortcomings of firstever Kiswahili spell checker developed by Open Kiswahili Localization Project(KILINUX). A spell-checking tool called MySpell has been used in developing a new spellchecker. The dictionary of a new spell checker consists of 4894 stems and its affixes werecreated based on Kiswahili noun classification system and by selecting different groups ofverb stems that follow the same trends in generating other Kiswahili valid words. Thispaper addresses the shortcomings of the existing spell checker and the approach carriedout to develop a new spell checker.