FASPell: A Fast, Adaptable, Simple, Powerful Chinese Spell Checker Based On DAE-Decoder Paradigm

We propose a Chinese spell checker – FASPell based on a new paradigm which consists of a denoising autoencoder (DAE) and a decoder. In comparison with previous stateof-the-art models, the new paradigm allows our spell checker to be Faster in computation, readily Adaptable to both simplified and traditional Chinese texts produced by either humans or machines, and to require much Simpler structure to be as much Powerful in both error detection and correction. These four achievements are made possible because the new paradigm circumvents two bottlenecks. First, the DAE curtails the amount of Chinese spell checking data needed for supervised learning (to <10k sentences) by leveraging the power of unsupervisedly pre-trained masked language model as in BERT, XLNet, MASS etc. Second, the decoder helps to eliminate the use of confusion set that is deficient in flexibility and sufficiency of utilizing the salient feature of Chinese character similarity.