Context-Aware & Grammar Validation

“သူ စား ချင်တယ်။” (He wants to eat.) — Correct “သူ စာ ချင်တယ်။” (He letter wants-to — ungrammatical; ချင် requires a preceding verb) — Spelling correct, context incorrect

“ကျောင်း သား တစ်ယောက်” (A student) — Correct “ကျောင်း သာ တစ်ယောက်” (School only one person) — Grammatically awkward

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Syntactic Grammar Checking

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How it Works

1. POS Tagging: Every word in the dictionary can optionally have a POS tag (e.g., N for Noun, V for Verb, P for Particle).
2. Rule Engine: A set of linguistic rules defines valid and invalid sequences.

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Example Rules

• Verb + Particle Agreement:
  • Invalid: သွား (Go/Verb) + ကျောင်း (School/Noun) → “Go School” (Grammatically awkward, missing particle)
  • Correction: ကျောင်းသွား or ကျောင်းကို သွား → “Go to school”
• Nominalizer Particle ကြောင်း vs Noun ကျောင်း:
  • သွားကြောင်း ပြောတယ် (Said that [he] went) — Correct: ကြောင်း nominalizes the verb
  • သွားကျောင်း ပြောတယ် — Invalid: ကျောင်း (school) cannot follow a verb directly
• Particle Selection (မှာ vs မှ):
  • ရုံးမှာ ရှိတယ် (Is at the office) — Correct: မှာ indicates location
  • ရုံးမှ လာတယ် (Came from the office) — Correct: မှ indicates origin
  • Rule: After Noun, မှာ typically means “at/in”. မှ typically means “from” or marks conditional.
• Subject Marker Agreement (က vs ကို):
  • သူက စာအုပ်ကို ဖတ်တယ် (He reads the book) — Correct
  • သူကို စာအုပ်က ဖတ်တယ် (The book reads him) — Semantically incorrect
  • Rule: Animate subjects typically take က; objects take ကို
• Question Particle Matching:
  • ဘယ်သူလဲ (Who is it?) — Correct: ဘယ် question word + လဲ particle
  • ဘယ်သူလား — Also valid but different nuance (softer question)
  • ဘာလဲ vs ဘာပဲ — Different meanings: “What?” vs “Whatever”

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N-gram Probability

1. Bigram: Probability of Word B following Word A ($P(B|A)$).
2. Trigram: Probability of Word C following A and B ($P(C|A,B)$).

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The Algorithm

1. Detection: When the checker encounters a sequence of words, it queries the database for the frequency of that sequence. If $P(Word_i | Word_{i-1})$ is below bigram_threshold, the word is flagged as suspicious.
2. Correction: The system generates candidates for the suspicious word (using SymSpell or Phonetic matching). It then re-calculates probabilities for each candidate in the sentence. Example: Input sentence “သူ စာ ချင်တယ်” (suspicious word: စာ)
   • Candidate “စား” (eat): $P(\text{စား} | \text{သူ}) = 0.08$ (High — common verb after pronoun)
   • Candidate “စာ” (letter): $P(\text{စာ} | \text{သူ}) = 0.002$ (Low — less common as standalone)
   The system suggests “စား” because it fits the context better with the verb-wanting pattern “ချင်တယ်”.

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Advanced Strategies

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1. Backoff Smoothing (Unigram Check)

• If the word is very common globally (high unigram frequency), we assume it is likely correct but used in a novel context. It is not flagged as an error.
• If the word is rare, it is more likely to be a typo.

• Input: မြန်မာ ဂီတ (Myanmar music) — bigram unseen in corpus
• ဂီတ has high unigram frequency (common word for “music”)
• Result: Not flagged as error, assumed to be valid novel combination

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2. Typo Heuristic

• If a neighbor has a high bigram probability ($P > \text{threshold} \times 10$), we assume the current word is a typo of that neighbor and flag it.

• Input: စာအုပ် ဖတ်တတ် (rare/unseen word ဖတ်တတ်)
• Neighbor found: ဖတ်တယ် (reads) — Edit Distance = 1
• $P(\text{ဖတ်တယ်} | \text{စာအုပ်}) = 0.15$ (high bigram probability)
• Result: Flag ဖတ်တတ် as likely typo of ဖတ်တယ်

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Tone Disambiguation

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How it Works

• Input: သံ ယောက် (Iron person?)
• Context: ယောက် (classifier for people) follows the word.
• Pattern Match: The pattern ("ယောက်", "ခု", "လုံး") is associated with the number သုံး (Three).
• Correction: သုံး ယောက် (Three people).

• Input: ငါ ကောင် (I animal?)
• Context: ကောင် (classifier for animals) follows the word.
• Pattern Match: Classifiers for counting animals/fish follow numbers.
• Correction: ငါး ကောင် (Five animals/fish).

• Input: အစာ စား vs အစ စား
• Context: စား (eat) follows — eating requires food (အစာ)
• Correction: အစာ စား (Eat food) — not အစ စား (Eat beginning)

• Input: သူတို့ သွားကြီး (They go big?)
• Context: သူတို့ (they) is a plural pronoun, expects plural verb marker
• Correction: သူတို့ သွားကြ (They go) — plural marker ကြ after verb

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Common Myanmar Grammar Errors Detected