CorSpell: Introducing a Semiautomatic Tool for Spelling Normalization in Brazilian Portuguese
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2026)
Abstract
With the growing availability of large text collections, efficient tools for corpus annotation and normalization have become increasingly important in linguistic and computational research. This paper presents CorSpell, a semiautomatic tool developed to support the spelling normalization of Brazilian Portuguese texts within the CorCel project—a corpus comprising over 15,000 handwritten exam responses from the Celpe-Bras proficiency test. Given the corpus scale, manual normalization is impractical; CorSpell streamlines this process by enabling users to visualize, select, and replace tokens directly through an intuitive web interface. The tool integrates automatic suggestions from PT-BR dictionaries with human validation, providing an interface for users to access and manipulate the texts. CorSpell significantly reduces annotation time, minimizes errors, and facilitates collaborative work, providing a practical and scalable solution for corpus normalization and a foundation for LLM-based modeling of Portuguese proficiency.