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Ordering the suggestions of a spellchecker without using context*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2009

ROGER MITTON
ROGER MITTON*
Affiliation:
School of Computer Science and Information Systems, Birkbeck, University of London, London WC1E 7HX, UK e-mail: R.Mitton@dcs.bbk.ac.uk
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Abstract

Having located a misspelling, a spellchecker generally offers some suggestions for the intended word. Even without using context, a spellchecker can draw on various types of information in ordering its suggestions. A series of experiments is described, beginning with a basic corrector that implements a well-known algorithm for reversing single simple errors, and making successive enhancements to take account of substring matches, pronunciation, known error patterns, syllable structure and word frequency. The improvement in the ordering produced by each enhancement is measured on a large corpus of misspellings. The final version is tested on other corpora against a widely used commercial spellchecker and a research prototype.

Type
Papers
Information
Natural Language Engineering , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , April 2009 , pp. 173 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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