Towards a single proposal is spelling correction

The study presented here relies on the integrated use of different kinds of knowledge in order to improve first-guess accuracy in non-word context-sensitive correction for general unrestricted texts. State of the art spelling correction systems, e.g. ispell, apart from detecting spelling errors, also assist the user by offering a set of candidate corrections that are close to the misspelled word. Based on the correction proposals of ispell, we built several guessers, which were combined in different ways. Firstly, we evaluated all possibilities and selected the best ones in a corpus with artificially generated typing errors. Secondly, the best combinations were tested on texts with genuine spelling errors. The results for the latter suggest that we can expect automatic non-word correction for all the errors in a free running text with 80% precision and a single proposal 98% of the times (1.02 proposals on average).