A spell checker with a user model for Swedish dyslexics

Dyslexics pose a great challenge to spelling checking programs. They are among the ones who need the programs the most, they make diverse and complicated errors, and they may have trouble picking out the intended word from a long list of suggestions. The idea behind the program described in this article is to start with a spell checker based on a noisy channel model and allow for multiple transformations of deletion, insertion, substitution and reversal between the typo and the intended/suggested word. A user model consists of matrices of how often the user makes these transformations for the different letters of the alphabet. When the user chooses a suggestion from the spell checker, the typo/correction pair is used to further update these matrices.