Fast and accurate misspelling correction in large corpora

Abstract

There are several NLP systems whose accuracy depends crucially on finding misspellings fast. However, the classical approach is based on a quadratic time algorithm with 80% coverage. We present a novel algorithm for misspelling detection, which runs in constant time and improves the coverage to more than 96%. We use this algorithm together with a cross document coreference system in order to find proper name misspellings. The experiments confirmed significant improvement over the state of the art.