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Correcting real-word spelling errors by restoring lexical cohesion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2005

GRAEME HIRST
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3G4 e-mail: [email protected], [email protected]
ALEXANDER BUDANITSKY
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3G4 e-mail: [email protected], [email protected]

Abstract

Spelling errors that happen to result in a real word in the lexicon cannot be detected by a conventional spelling checker. We present a method for detecting and correcting many such errors by identifying tokens that are semantically unrelated to their context and are spelling variations of words that would be related to the context. Relatedness to context is determined by a measure of semantic distance initially proposed by Jiang and Conrath (1997). We tested the method on an artificial corpus of errors; it achieved recall of 23–50% and precision of 18–25%.

Type
Papers
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

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