Data Collection and Analysis of Mapudungun Morphology for Spelling Correction

This paper describes part of a three year collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute, the Programa de Educación Intercultural Bilingüe of the Chilean Ministry of Education, and Universidad de La Frontera (Temuco, Chile).  We are currently constructing a spelling checker for Mapudungun, a polysynthetic language spoken by the Mapuche people in Chile and Argentina.  The spelling checker will be built in MySpell, the spell checking system used by the open source office suite OpenOffice.  This paper also describes the spoken language corpus that is used as a source of data for developing the spelling checker.