Spell checker for consumer language (CSpell)

Automated understanding of consumer health inquiries might be hindered by misspellings. To detect and correct various types of spelling errors in consumer health questions, we developed a distributable spell-checking tool, CSpell, that handles nonword errors, real-word errors, word boundary infractions, punctuation errors, and combinations of the above.

We developed a novel approach of using dual embedding within Word2vec for context-dependent corrections. This technique was used in combination with dictionary-based corrections in a 2-stage ranking system. We also developed various splitters and handlers to correct word boundary infractions. All correction approaches are integrated to handle errors in consumer health questions.

Our approach achieves an F1 score of 80.93% and 69.17% for spelling error detection and correction, respectively.

The dual-embedding model shows a significant improvement (9.13%) in F1 score compared with the general practice of using cosine similarity with word vectors in Word2vec for context ranking. Our 2-stage ranking system shows a 4.94% improvement in F1 score compared with the best 1-stage ranking system.

CSpell improves over the state of the art and provides near real-time automatic misspelling detection and correction in consumer health questions. The software and the CSpell test set are available at https://umlslex.nlm.nih.gov/cSpell.