A technique for computer detection and correction of spelling errors

Abstract

The method described assumes that a word which cannot be found in a dictionary has at most one error, which might be a wrong, missing or extra letter or a single transposition. The unidentified input word is compared to the dictionary again, testing each time to see if the words match assuming one of these errors occurred. During a test run on garbled text, correct identifications were made for over 95 percent of these error types. © 1964, ACM. All rights reserved.