Diacritics restoration based on word n-grams for Slovak texts

Abstract

Despite the modern boom in technology, we are still faced with the fact that people write texts without diacritics. There are two main reasons for this. The first, historical reason stems from the past when the use of diacritics was troublesome and people would write text without them. The second one is the speed - typing without diacritics is usually faster. Text without diacritics is easy to understand for people, but for some types of documents, missing diacritics can cause a problem. This is also an issue when computers process such text. In this paper, we propose an algorithm based on word n-grams (a contiguous sequence of n words) that can restore diacritics of text written in the Slovak language. We also compare and evaluate our results with other algorithms developed for Slovak text.