On using context for automatic correction of non-word misspellings in student essays

  • Authors:
  • Michael Flor;Yoko Futagi

  • Affiliations:
  • Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ;Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Building Educational Applications Using NLP
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

In this paper we present a new spell-checking system that utilizes contextual information for automatic correction of non-word misspellings. The system is evaluated with a large corpus of essays written by native and non-native speakers of English to the writing prompts of high-stakes standardized tests (TOEFL® and GRE®). We also present comparative evaluations with Aspell and the speller from Microsoft Office 2007. Using context-informed re-ranking of candidate suggestions, our system exhibits superior error-correction results overall and also corrects errors generated by non-native English writers with almost same rate of success as it does for writers who are native English speakers.