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Abstract : |
This paper addresses the problem of correcting spelling errors that result in valid, though unintended words (such aspeace and piece, orquiet and quite) and also the problem of correcting particular word usage errors (such as amount and number, or among and between). Such corrections require contextual information and are not handled by conventional spelling programs such as Unix spell. First, we introduce a method called Trigrams that uses part-of-speech trigrams to encode the context. This method uses a small number of parameters compared to previous methods based on word trigrams. However, it is e ectively unable to distinguish among words that have the same part of speech. For this case, an alternative feature-based method called Bayes performs better; but Bayes is less e ective than Trigrams when the distinction among words depends on syntactic constraints. A hybrid method called Tribayes is then introduced that combines the best of the previous two methods. The improvement in performance of Tribayes over its components is veri ed experimentally. Tribayes is also compared with the grammar checker in Microsoft Word, and is found to have substantially higher performance., |
