Design
A basic spell checker carries out the following processes:
- It scans the text and extracts the words contained in it
- It then compares each word with a known list of correctly spelled words (i.e. a dictionary). This might contain just a list of words, or it might also contain additional information, such as hyphenation points or lexical and grammatical attributes.
- An additional step is a language-dependent algorithm for handling morphology. Even for a lightly inflected language like English, the spell-checker will need to consider different forms of the same word, such as plurals, verbal forms, contractions, and possessives. For many other languages, such as those featuring agglutination and more complex declension and conjugation, this part of the process is more complicated.
It is unclear whether morphological analysis provides a significant benefit for English, though its benefits for highly synthetic languages such as German, Hungarian or Turkish are clear.
As an adjunct to these components, the program's user interface will allow users to approve or reject replacements and modify the program's operation.
An alternative type of spell checker uses solely statistical information, such as n-grams. This approach usually requires a lot of effort to obtain sufficient statistical information and may require a lot more runtime storage. This method is not currently in general use.
In some cases spell checkers use a fixed list of misspellings and suggestions for those misspellings; this less flexible approach is often used in paper-based correction methods, such as the see also entries of encyclopedias.
Read more about this topic: Spellcheck
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