Learning a spelling error model from search query logs.pdf

Learning a Spelling Error Model from Search Query Logs Farooq Ahmad Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Alberta Edmonton, Canada farooq@ualberta.ca Grzegorz Kondrak Department of Computing Science University of Alberta Edmonton, Canada kondrak@cs.ualberta.ca Abstract Applying the noisy channel model to search query spelling correction requires an error model and a language model. Typically, the error model relies on a weighted string edit distance measure. The weights can be learned from pairs of misspelled words and their corrections. This paper investigates using the Expec- tation Maximization algorithm to learn edit distance weights directly from search query logs, without relying on a corpus of paired words. 1 Introduction There are several sources of error in written lan- guage. Typing errors can be divided into two groups (Kucich, 1992): typographic errors and cog- nitive errors. Typographic errors are the result of mistyped keys and can be described in terms of key- board key proximity. Cognitive errors on the other hand, are caused by a misunderstanding of the cor- rect spelling of a word. They include phonetic er- rors, in which similar sounding letter sequences are substituted for the correct sequence; and homonym errors, in which a word is substituted for another word with the same pronunciation but a different meaning. Spelling errors can also be grouped into errors that result in another valid word, such as homonym errors, versus those errors that result in a non-word. Generally non-word errors are easier to detect and correct. In addition to its traditional use in word processing, spelling correction also has ap- plications in optical character recognition and hand- writing recognition. Spelling errors in this context are caused by inaccurate character recognition. Spelling correction is a well developed research problem in the field of computational linguistics. The first dictionary based approach to spelling cor- rection (