An In-Depth Comparison of 14 Spelling Correction Tools on a Common Benchmark

Markus Näther


Abstract
Determining and correcting spelling and grammar errors in text is an important but surprisingly difficult task. There are several reasons why this remains challenging. Errors may consist of simple typing errors like deleted, substituted, or wrongly inserted letters, but may also consist of word confusions where a word was replaced by another one. In addition, words may be erroneously split into two parts or get concatenated. Some words can contain hyphens, because they were split at the end of a line or are compound words with a mandatory hyphen. In this paper, we provide an extensive evaluation of 14 spelling correction tools on a common benchmark. In particular, the evaluation provides a detailed comparison with respect to 12 error categories. The benchmark consists of sentences from the English Wikipedia, which were distorted using a realistic error model. Measuring the quality of an algorithm with respect to these error categories requires an alignment of the original text, the distorted text and the corrected text provided by the tool. We make our benchmark generation and evaluation tools publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.228
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
1849–1857
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.228
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Markus Näther. 2020. An In-Depth Comparison of 14 Spelling Correction Tools on a Common Benchmark. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 1849–1857, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
An In-Depth Comparison of 14 Spelling Correction Tools on a Common Benchmark (Näther, LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.228.pdf