  In computing, spell checking is the process of detecting and sometimes
providing spelling suggestions for incorrectly spelled words in a text.
Basically, a spell checker is a computer program that uses a dictionary of
words to perform spell checking. The bigger the dictionary is, the higher is
the error detection rate. The fact that spell checkers are based on regular
dictionaries, they suffer from data sparseness problem as they cannot capture
large vocabulary of words including proper names, domain-specific terms,
technical jargons, special acronyms, and terminologies. As a result, they
exhibit low error detection rate and often fail to catch major errors in the
text. This paper proposes a new context-sensitive spelling correction method
for detecting and correcting non-word and real-word errors in digital text
documents. The approach hinges around data statistics from Google Web 1T 5-gram
data set which consists of a big volume of n-gram word sequences, extracted
from the World Wide Web. Fundamentally, the proposed method comprises an error
detector that detects misspellings, a candidate spellings generator based on a
character 2-gram model that generates correction suggestions, and an error
corrector that performs contextual error correction. Experiments conducted on a
set of text documents from different domains and containing misspellings,
showed an outstanding spelling error correction rate and a drastic reduction of
both non-word and real-word errors. In a further study, the proposed algorithm
is to be parallelized so as to lower the computational cost of the error
detection and correction processes.
