Adaptive text correction with Web-crawled domain-dependent dictionaries

Abstract

For the success of lexical text correction, high coverage of the underlying background dictionary is crucial. Still, most correction tools are built on top of static dictionaries that represent fixed collections of expressions of a given language. When treating texts from specific domains and areas, often a significant part of the vocabulary is missed. In this situation, both automated and interactive correction systems produce suboptimal results. In this article, we describe strategies for crawling Web pages that fit the thematic domain of the given input text. Special filtering techniques are introduced to avoid pages with many orthographic errors. Collecting the vocabulary of filtered pages that meet the vocabulary of the input text, dynamic dictionaries of modest size are obtained that reach excellent coverage values. A tool has been developed that automatically crawls dictionaries in the indicated way. Our correction experiments with crawled dictionaries, which address English and German document collections from a variety of thematic fields, show that with these dictionaries even the error rate of highly accurate texts can be reduced, using completely automated correction methods. For interactive text correction, more sensible candidate sets for correcting erroneous words are obtained and the manual effort is reduced in a significant way. To complete this picture, we study the effect when using word trigram models for correction. Again, trigram models from crawled corpora outperform those obtained from static corpora.