Data-Driven Approach for Spellchecking and Autocorrection

Abstract

This article presents an approach for spellchecking and autocorrection using web data for morphologically complex languages (in the case of Kazakh language), which can be considered an end-to-end approach that does not require any manually annotated word–error pairs. A sizable web of noisy data is crawled and used as a base to infer the knowledge of misspellings with their correct forms. Using the extracted corpus, a sub-string error model with a context model for morphologically complex languages are trained separately, then these two models are integrated with a regularization parameter. A sub-string alignment model is applied to extract symmetric and non-symmetric patterns in two sequences of word–error pairs. The model calculates the probability for symmetric and non-symmetric patterns of a given misspelling and its candidates to obtain a suggestion list. Based on the proposed method, a Kazakh Spellchecking and Autocorrection system is developed, which we refer to as QazSpell. Several experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed approach from different angles. The results show that the proposed approach achieves a good outcome when only using the error model, and the performance is boosted after integrating the context model. In addition, the developed system, QazSpell, outperforms the commercial analogs in terms of overall accuracy.