A graph approach to spelling correction in domain-centric search

Spelling correction for keyword-search queries is challenging in restricted domains such as personal email (or desktop) search, due to the scarcity of query logs, and due to the specialized nature of the domain. For that task, this paper presents an algorithm that is based on statistics from the corpus data (rather than the query log). This algorithm, which employs a simple graph-based approach, can incorporate different types of data sources with different levels of reliability (e.g., email subject vs. email body), and can handle complex spelling errors like splitting and merging of words. An experimental study shows the superiority of the algorithm over existing alternatives in the email domain. © 2011 Association for Computational Linguistics.