Spelling correction of user search queries through statistical machine translation

Abstract

We use character-based statistical machine translation in order to correct user search queries in the e-commerce domain. The training data is automatically extracted from event logs where users re-issue their search queries with potentially corrected spelling within the same session. We show results on a test set which was annotated by humans and compare against online autocorrection capabilities of three additional web sites. Overall, the methods presented in this paper outperform fully productized spellchecking and autocorrection services in terms of accuracy and FI score. We also propose novel evaluation steps based on retrieved search results of the corrected queries in terms of quantity and relevance.