A Discriminative Reranking Approach to Spelling Correction

This paper proposes a novel approach to spelling correction. It reranks the output of an existing spelling corrector, Aspell. A discriminative model (Ranking SVM) is employed to improve upon the initial ranking, using additional features as evidence. These features are derived from state-of-the-art techniques in spelling correction, including edit distance, letter-based n-gram, phonetic similarity and noisy channel model. This paper also presents a new method to automatically extract training samples from the query log chain. The system outperforms the baseline Aspell greatly, as well as previous models and several off-the-shelf systems (e.g. spelling corrector in Microsoft Word 2003). The experimental results based on query chain pairs are comparable to that based on manually-annotated pairs, with 32.2%/32.6% reduction in error rate, respectively.