Real-Word Spelling Correction with Trigrams: A Reconsideration of the Mays, Damerau, and Mercer Model

The trigram-based noisy-channel model of real-word spelling-error correction that was presented by Mays, Damerau, and Mercer in 1991 has never been adequately evaluated or compared with other methods. We analyze the advantages and limitations of the method, and present a new evaluation that enables a meaningful comparison with the WordNet-based method of Hirst and Budanitsky. The trigram method is found to be superior, even on content words. We then improve the method further and experiment with a new variation that optimizes over fixed-length windows instead of over sentences.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CICLING
• Authors: L. Amber Wilcox-O'Hearn, Graeme Hirst, Alexander Budanitsky
• Keywords: CICLING 2008, Natural Language Processing, Real-word Spelling-error Correction, Trigram-based Noisy-channel Model, WordNet-based Method