Automatic Insertion of Accents in French Text
Michel G. Simard · 1998
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. We present an AAI method for French, based on a stochastic language model. This method was implemented into a program and C library of functions, which are now commercially available. Our experiments show that French text processed with this program contains less than one accent error per 130 words. We also show how our AAI method can be used to do on-the-fly accent insertions within a word-processing environment, which makes it possible to write in French without having to type accents. A prototype of such a system was integrated into the Emacs editor, and is now available to all students and employees of the Universit'e de Montr'eal's compu...