Typographical nearest-neighbor search in a finite-state lexicon and its application to spelling correction

Abstract

A method of error-tolerant lookup in a finite-state lexicon is described, as well as its application to automatic spelling correction. We compare our method to the algorithm by K. Oflazer [14]. While Oflazer's algorithm searches for all possible corrections of a misspelled word that are within a given similarity threshold, our approach is to retain only the most similar corrections (nearest neighbours), reducing dynamically the search space in the lexicon, and to reach the first correction as soon as possible.