A computational phonetic model for indian language scripts

In spite of South Asia being one of the richest areas in terms of linguistic diversity, South Asian languages have a lot in common. For example, most of the major Indian languages use scripts which are derived from the ancient Brahmi script, have more or less the same arrangement of alphabet, are highly phonetic in nature and are very well organised. We have used this fact to build a computational phonetic model of Brahmi origin scripts. The phonetic model mainly consists of a model of phonology (including some orthographic features) based on a common alphabet of these scripts, numerical values assigned to these features, a stepped distance function (SDF), and an algorithm for aligning strings of feature vectors. The SDF is used to calculate the phonetic and orthographic similarity of two letters. The model can be used for applications like spell checking, predicting spelling/dialectal variation, text normalization, finding rhyming words, and identifying cognate words across languages. Some initial experiments have been done on this and the results seem encouraging.