A Large List of Confusion Sets for Spellchecking Assessed Against a Corpus of Real-word Errors

One of the methods that has been proposed for dealing with real-word errors (errors that occur when a correctly spelled word is substituted for the one intended) is the "confusion-set" approach - a confusion set being a small group of words that are likely to be confused with one another. Using a list of confusion sets drawn up in advance, a spellchecker, on finding one of these words in a text, can assess whether one of the other members of its set would be a better fit and, if it appears to be so, propose that word as a correction. Much of the research using this approach has suffered from two weaknesses. The first is the small number of confusion sets used. The second is that systems have largely been tested on artificial errors. In this paper we address these two weaknesses. We describe the creation of a realistically sized list of confusion sets, then the assembling of a corpus of real-word errors, and then we assess the potential of that list in relation to that corpus.