KidSpell: A Child-Oriented, Rule-Based, Phonetic Spellchecker

Brody Downs, Oghenemaro Anuyah, Aprajita Shukla, Jerry Alan Fails, Sole Pera, Katherine Wright, Casey Kennington


Abstract
For help with their spelling errors, children often turn to spellcheckers integrated in software applications like word processors and search engines. However, existing spellcheckers are usually tuned to the needs of traditional users (i.e., adults) and generally prove unsatisfactory for children. Motivated by this issue, we introduce KidSpell, an English spellchecker oriented to the spelling needs of children. KidSpell applies (i) an encoding strategy for mapping both misspelled words and spelling suggestions to their phonetic keys and (ii) a selection process that prioritizes candidate spelling suggestions that closely align with the misspelled word based on their respective keys. To assess the effectiveness of, we compare the model’s performance against several popular, mainstream spellcheckers in a number of offline experiments using existing and novel datasets. The results of these experiments show that KidSpell outperforms existing spellcheckers, as it accurately prioritizes relevant spelling corrections when handling misspellings generated by children in both essay writing and online search tasks. As a byproduct of our study, we create two new datasets comprised of spelling errors generated by children from hand-written essays and web search inquiries, which we make available to the research community.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.857
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:
6937–6946
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.857
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Brody Downs, Oghenemaro Anuyah, Aprajita Shukla, Jerry Alan Fails, Sole Pera, Katherine Wright, and Casey Kennington. 2020. KidSpell: A Child-Oriented, Rule-Based, Phonetic Spellchecker. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6937–6946, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
KidSpell: A Child-Oriented, Rule-Based, Phonetic Spellchecker (Downs et al., LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.857.pdf