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A spelling corrector incorporating knowledge of English orthography and pronunciation

Brett Kessler

Abstract:

I have developed a spelling corrector, correct, based on a model treating misspellings as flawed attempts to spell words using the sound-spelling correspondences of English orthography. On a common test suite, it generates a correct guess for 97% of the misspellings. It ranks multiple guesses by the Levenshtein distance from the misspelling, combined with the frequency of the sound-spelling correspondences presumed to have generated the misspelling. The average rank of the correct respelling, using a complete English dictionary as the universe of candidate respellings, is 1.1. This paper describes the development and structure of the correct programme.





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    Webster: Brett Kessler
    bkessler@spell.psychology.wayne.edu
    Last change Feb. 16, 1999