A technique for computer detection and correction of spelling errors

  • Authors:
  • Fred J. Damerau

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM Corporation, Yorktown Heights, NY

  • Venue:
  • Communications of the ACM
  • Year:
  • 1964

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Abstract

The method described assumes that a word which cannot be found in a dictionary has at most one error, which might be a wrong, missing or extra letter or a single transposition. The unidentified input word is compared to the dictionary again, testing each time to see if the words match—assuming one of these errors occurred. During a test run on garbled text, correct identifications were made for over 95 percent of these error types.