Towards Context-Dependent Phonetic Spelling Error Correction in Children's Freely Composed Text for Diagnostic and Pedagogical Purposes

Reading and writing are core competencies of any society. In Germany, international and national comparative studies such as PISA or IGLU have shown that around 25% of German school children do not reach the minimal competence level necessary to function effectively in society by the age of 15. Automized diagnosis and spelling tutoring of children can play an important role in raising their orthographic level of competence. One of several necessary steps in an automatic spelling tutoring system is the automatic correction of achieved text that was freely written by children and contains errors. Based on the common knowledge that children in the first years of school write as they speak, we propose a novel, context-sensitive spelling correction algorithm that uses phonetic similarities, in order to achieve this step. We evaluate our approach on a test set of texts written by children and show that it outperforms Hunspell, a well established isolated error correction program used in text processors.