Implementation Aspects and Applications of a Spelling Correction Algorithm

A method for detecting and correcting spelling errors in Swedish text was presented by Domeij, Hollman and Kann (1994). The objectives were to perform very fast detection and correction of errors and to use a full size word list. Our implementation of the method as a C program is called Stava. We have further reøned this method and implemented ranking of corrections using word frequencies and editing distance. We also describe how the method can be used in several applications, for example when extending a partof -speech lexicon, tagging unknown words, stemming and correcting search questions in information retrieval. Keywords: spelling error detection, spelling error correction, Bloom ølter. 1 Introduction How to automatically detect and correct spelling errors is an old problem. Nowadays, most word processors include some sort of spelling error detection. The traditional way of detecting spelling errors is to use a word list, usually also containing some grammatical information, an..