Spellcheck - Context-sensitive Spell Checkers

Context-sensitive Spell Checkers

Recently, research has focused on developing algorithms which are capable of recognizing a misspelled word, even if the word itself is in the vocabulary, based on the context of the surrounding words. Not only does this allow words such as those in the poem above to be caught, but it mitigates the detrimental effect of enlarging dictionaries, allowing more words to be recognized. For example, baht in the same paragraph as Thai or Thailand would not be recognized as a misspelling of bath. The most common example of errors caught by such a system are homophone errors, such as the bold words in the following sentence:

Their coming too sea if its reel.

The most successful algorithm to date is Andrew Golding and Dan Roth's "Winnow-based spelling correction algorithm", published in 1999, which is able to recognize about 96% of context-sensitive spelling errors, in addition to ordinary non-word spelling errors. A context-sensitive spell checker appears in Microsoft Office 2007, Google Wave, Ginger Software and in Ghotit Dyslexia Software context spell checker tuned for people with dyslexia.