Automatic spelling correction using a trigram similarity measure

Experiments suggest that the nearest neighbour search procedure results in the unique identification of the correct spelling for over 75% of the misspellings if the correct form of the word is in the dictionary, and that this figure may be increased to over 90% if near, rather than nearest, neighbours are acceptable.

Abstract

A nearest neighbour search procedure is described for the automatic correction of misspellings. The procedure involves the replacement of a misspelt word by that word in a dictionary which best matches the misspelling, the degree of match being calculated using a similarity coefficient based on the number of trigrams common to the two words. Experiments with a collection of 1544 misspellings and a dictionary of 64,636 words suggest that the procedure results in the unique identification of the correct spelling for over 75% of the misspellings if the correct form of the word is in the dictionary, and that this figure may be increased to over 90% if near, rather than nearest, neighbours are acceptable.