NeuSpell: A Neural Spelling Correction Toolkit

10/21/2020
by   Sai Muralidhar Jayanthi, et al.
15

We introduce NeuSpell, an open-source toolkit for spelling correction in English. Our toolkit comprises ten different models, and benchmarks them on naturally occurring misspellings from multiple sources. We find that many systems do not adequately leverage the context around the misspelt token. To remedy this, (i) we train neural models using spelling errors in context, synthetically constructed by reverse engineering isolated misspellings; and (ii) use contextual representations. By training on our synthetic examples, correction rates improve by 9 trained on randomly sampled character perturbations. Using richer contextual representations boosts the correction rate by another 3 practitioners to use our proposed and existing spelling correction systems, both via a unified command line, as well as a web interface. Among many potential applications, we demonstrate the utility of our spell-checkers in combating adversarial misspellings. The toolkit can be accessed at neuspell.github.io. Code and pretrained models are available at http://github.com/neuspell/neuspell.

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