Integrating Dictionary and Web N-grams for Chinese Spell Checking

Chinese spell checking is an important component of many NLP applications, including word processors, search engines, and automatic essay rating. Nevertheless, compared to spell checkers for alphabetical languages (e.g., English or French), Chinese spell checkers are more difficult to develop because there are no word boundaries in the Chinese writing system and errors may be caused by various Chinese input methods. In this paper, we propose a novel method for detecting and correcting Chinese typographical errors. Our approach involves word segmentation, detection rules, and phrase-based machine translation. The error detection module detects errors by segmenting words and checking word and phrase frequency based on compiled and Web corpora. The phonological or morphological typographical errors found then are corrected by running a decoder based on the statistical machine translation model (SMT). The results show that the proposed system achieves significantly better accuracy in error detection and more satisfactory performance in error correction than the state-of-the-art systems.