TamilMayangoliSpell: An Open-Source Neural Framework for Context-Sensitive Mayangoli Error Correction in Tamil
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Mayangoli errors are context-sensitive errors in Tamil that arise from confusion among phonetically similar graphemes (e.g., ல/ள/ழ, ர/ற, ந/ன/ண).These errors are challenging for conventional spell checkers because both incorrect and correct forms are valid dictionary words, making dictionary lookup insufficient and requiring contextual modelling.We present TamilMayangoliSpell, a reproducible framework for Mayangoli error correction that combines (i) Tamil-specific preprocessing for sentence segmentation and normalisation, (ii) linguistically grounded error induction for generating training data constrained by dictionary validity, and (iii) fine-tuning of multilingual sequence-to-sequence models.Using 30,000 sentence pairs derived from Tamil-Corp, a massive multi-genre Tamil corpus and split 80/10/10 into train/validation/test, we fine-tune mBART, mT5, and NLLB under a small hyperparameter grid using greedy decoding with a maximum sequence length of 128.mT5 achieves the best performance (BLEU 99.28; Exact Match Accuracy 93.50%) and remains strong in a cross-genre evaluation on short stories.The preprocessing scripts, generated parallel datasets, and trained models are publicly available in a GitHub repository.
Authors: Yazhmozhi V M, Annalu Waller, Jacky Visser
Institutions: University of Salford, University of Dundee
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7166877673