A Discriminative Model for Query Spelling Correction with Latent Structural SVM
Huizhong Duan, Yanen Li, ChengXiang Zhai, Dan Roth · 2012
Discriminative training in query spelling correction is difficult due to the complex internal structures of the data. Recent work on query spelling correction suggests a two stage approach a noisy channel model that is used to retrieve a number of candidate corrections, followed by discriminatively trained ranker applied to these candidates. The ranker, however, suffers from the fact the low recall of the first, suboptimal, search stage. This paper proposes to directly optimize the search stage with a discriminative model based on latent structural SVM. In this model, we treat query spelling correction as a multiclass classification problem with structured input and output. The latent structural information is used to model the alignment of words in the spelling correction process. Experiment results show that as a standalone speller, our model outperforms all the baseline systems. It also attains a higher recall compared with the noisy channel model, and can therefore serve as a better filtering stage when combined with a ranker. 1