Correction of phonographic errors in natural language interfaces
Jean Véronis · 1988
In this paper, we point out that, in applications available to the general public, and/or natural language interfaces, the correction of phonographic errors (which are competence errors) is far more important than the correction of typographical errors (which are simply performance errors). Many studies aimed at the correction of typographical errors have been carried out, but relatively few tackle the problem of phonographic correction, and they are generally based on more or less ad hoc methods. We propose a mathematical framework for phonographic correction by defining a similarity relation between phonetically related substrings and a dissimilarity index between strings. We also provide a simple and efficient algorithm for recognizing words in dictionaries from misspelt inputs including both typographical and phonographic errors.