Integrating romanized Nepali spellchecker with SMS based decision support system for Nepalese farmers

Now-a-days the role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to develop and strengthen the sector of agriculture has become seemingly promising. ICT can help a farmer to get relevant information regarding different agricultural information like crop, diseases, marketing, etc. Also, studies have depicted that mobile phone penetration in Nepal have increased in the recent years. This have opened a new possibility for implementing SMS (Short Message Service) based information dissemination services in order to reduce information asymmetry prominent in the country due to extreme geography. This work proposes an approach based on simple SMS service for disseminating agricultural knowledge to the needy farmers in a cost effective and easily deployable manner. Here, the farmers can get consultancy expert advices by sending simple queries (in romanized Nepali language) as a SMS to a central knowledge base. But, the end users, may not provide correct spelling in their queires. Therefore, we integrated a domain specific (i.e. romanized Nepali) spell checker for improving robustness of the system. The purposed approach is seemingly promising than other advanced mobile applications because the general farmer community use simple handset with basic features only.