Handling Reduplication in Basque: A Problem for Spell Checking

Resumen

In spell-checkers, reduplication (repetition of a word, or a part of it) is often subsumed under repetition and is either ignored or treated as erroneous. For most languages it is a valid strategy, however Basque is different in this respect as it exhibits several instances of valid partial or complete repetition of phrases. This issue appears to have been mostly ignored in existing computational applications. In this paper we provide a linguistic description of the phenomenon and present a prototype to be integrated in a complete spelling and grammar checker that would be capable of handling reduplication better than existing systems.