Spell checkers and correctors : a unified treatment

The aim of this dissertation is to provide a unified treatment of various spell checkers and correctors. Firstly, the spell checking and correcting problems are formally described in mathematics in order to provide a better understanding of these tasks. An approach that is similar to the way in which denotational semantics used to describe programming languages is adopted. Secondly, the various attributes of existing spell checking and correcting techniques are discussed. Extensive studies on selected spell checking/correcting algorithms and packages are then performed. Lastly, an empirical investigation of various spell checking/correcting packages is presented. It provides a comparison and suggests a classification of these packages in terms of their functionalities, implementation strategies, and performance. The investigation was conducted on packages for spell checking and correcting in English as well as in Northern Sotho and Chinese. The classification provides a unified presentation of the strengths and weaknesses of the techniques studied in the research. The findings provide a better understanding of these techniques in order to assist in improving some existing spell checking/correcting applications and future spell checking/correcting package designs and implementations.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Pretoria

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Watson, Bruce William

• Performance
• N-gram
• Fsa
• Formal concept analysis
• Edit distance
• Dictionary lookup
• Classification
• Spell checking
• Spell correcting
• UCTD

Statement dc:rights

• ©University of Pretoria 2008 Please cite as follows Liang, HL 2008, Spell checkers and correctors : a unified treatment, MSc dissertation, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, viewed yymmdd < http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-06252009-163007/ > E1305/

Dc Identifier Other

E1305/gm

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.up.ac.za:2263/25833