Corrects common German transcriptions like "frueher" to use the proper Umlaut ü ("früher"). Available on Firefox and Chrome.
Installation requires access to websites to correct typing in input boxes. All data is processed locally and is not sent to remote servers!
On computer systems that don't support them, German words like "Erklärung" are often written as "Erklaerung" to avoid the use of diacritic letters. This is readable but looks odd. An easy solution would be to replace all two letter combinations to their proper Umlaut-form and though this fixes 100% of potential words, there are too many false positives (for example the word "neue" would never be written "neü"). This project uses machine learning* to predict if a substitution should be made.
In the current configuration trained on 363935 words (from the Leipzig Corpora) and looking at 4 characters to the left and right, 90.6% Umlauts are inserted correctly and 0.3% are inserted incorrectly. It is possible to increase the number of correct insertions by adjusting the confidence threshold, but that increases the false positive rate and makes the program more annoying to use. A sample set of words is shown in the final performance evaluation:
Umlauts changed correctly: 0.9058
Non-umlauts changed incorrectly: 0.0026
F-1 score: 0.9431
müsste (0.0474) Mühe (0.0474) zuerst (0.9859) neue (0.9999) Müller (0.0474) früher (0.1473) anhängen (0.4901) drangehängt (0.3098) Nürnberg (0.8122) abfüllen (0.0455) Fussball (1.0000) Brühe (0.0817) rührend (0.2050) Zuerich (0.9859) löten (0.0361) zögern (0.0347) anloeten (0.9985) ähnlich (1.0000) früher (0.1473) Kühe (0.0376) Erläuterungen (0.3591) erneuern (0.9998) genügend (0.0281) Züge (0.0398) Nussnacker (1.0000)
which looks good enough to me.
A Python program parses a corpus and generates frequency counts for letter combinations (like n-grams) which are used to statistically determine the likelihood of an Umlaut being needed. This data is encoded as a JSON file to be used in the future.
A Chrome/Firefox extension reads this JSON file and uses it to predict the need for Umlauts as the user types in input boxes, replacing as needed. The program looks at the letters before and after potential matches to determine the confidence it has in a replacement. If it crosses a high enough margin, the replacement is made.
This is still in beta. There are some kinks with the text replacement on the browser-side. Please create an issue if you spot any problems.
* fun fact: using buzzwords makes your project sound 200% more impressive