State-of-the-Art in Weighted Finite-State Spell-Checking

The following claims can be made about finite-state methods for spell-checking: 1 Finite-state language models provide support for morphologically complex languages that word lists, affix stripping and similar approaches do not provide; 2 Weighted finite-state models have expressive power equal to other, state-of-the-art string algorithms used by contemporary spell-checkers; and 3 Finite-state models are at least as fast as other string algorithms for lookup and error correction. In this article, we use some contemporary non-finite-state spell-checking methods as a baseline and perform tests in light of the claims, to evaluate state-of-the-art finite-state spell-checking methods. We verify that finite-state spell-checking systems outperform the traditional approaches for English. We also show that the models for morphologically complex languages can be made to perform on par with English systems.