Spell correction

Spell correction, also known as:

• Auto correction
• Text correction
• Fixing spelling errors
• Typo tolerance
• “Did you mean?”

and so on, is a software functionality that suggests alternatives to or makes automatic corrections of the text you have typed in. The concept of correcting typed text dates back to the 1960s when computer scientist Warren Teitelman, who also invented the “undo” command, introduced a philosophy of computing called D.W.I.M., or “Do What I Mean.” Instead of programming computers to accept only perfectly formatted instructions, Teitelman argued that they should be programmed to recognize obvious mistakes.

The first well-known product to provide spell correction functionality was Microsoft Word 6.0, released in 1993.

How it works

There are a few ways spell correction can be done, but it’s important to note that there is no purely programmatic way to convert your mistyped “ipone” into “iphone” with decent quality. Mostly, there has to be a dataset the system is based on. The dataset can be:

• A dictionary of properly spelled words, which in turn can be:
  • Based on your real data. The idea here is that, for the most part, the spelling in the dictionary made up of your data is correct, and the system tries to find a word that is most similar to the typed word (we’ll discuss how this can be done with Manticore shortly).
  • Or it can be based on an external dictionary unrelated to your data. The issue that may arise here is that your data and the external dictionary can be too different: some words may be missing in the dictionary, while others may be missing in your data.
• Not just dictionary-based, but also context-aware, e.g., “white ber” would be corrected to “white bear,” while “dark ber” would be corrected to “dark beer.” The context might not just be a neighboring word in your query, but also your location, time of day, the current sentence’s grammar (to change “there” to “their” or not), your search history, and virtually any other factors that can affect your intent.
• Another classic approach is to use previous search queries as the dataset for spell correction. This is even more utilized in autocomplete functionality but makes sense for autocorrect too. The idea is that users are mostly right with spelling, so we can use words from their search history as a source of truth, even if we don’t have the words in our documents or use an external dictionary. Context-awareness is also possible here.

Manticore provides the commands CALL QSUGGEST and CALL SUGGEST that can be used for automatic spell correction purposes.

CALL QSUGGEST, CALL SUGGEST

Both commands are available via SQL only, and the general syntax is:

CALL QSUGGEST(word, table [,options])
CALL SUGGEST(word, table [,options])

options: N as option_name[, M as another_option, ...]

These commands provide all suggestions from the dictionary for a given word. They work only on tables with infixing enabled and dict=keywords. They return the suggested keywords, Levenshtein distance between the suggested and original keywords, and the document statistics of the suggested keyword.

If the first parameter contains multiple words, then: * CALL QSUGGEST will return suggestions only for the last word, ignoring the rest. * CALL SUGGEST will return suggestions only for the first word.

That’s the only difference between them. Several options are supported for customization:

To show how it works, let’s create a table and add a few documents to it.

create table products(title text) min_infix_len='2';
insert into products values (0,'Crossbody Bag with Tassel'), (0,'microfiber sheet set'), (0,'Pet Hair Remover Glove');

Single word example

As you can see, the mistyped word “crossbUdy” gets corrected to “crossbody”. By default, CALL SUGGEST/QSUGGEST return:

• distance - the Levenshtein distance which means how many edits they had to make to convert the given word to the suggestion
• docs - number of documents containing the suggested word

To disable the display of these statistics, you can use the option 0 as result_stats.

Example:

call suggest('crossbudy', 'products');

+-----------+----------+------+
| suggest   | distance | docs |
+-----------+----------+------+
| crossbody | 1        | 1    |
+-----------+----------+------+

CALL SUGGEST takes only the first word

If the first parameter is not a single word, but multiple, then CALL SUGGEST will return suggestions only for the first word.

Example:

call suggest('bagg with tasel', 'products');

+---------+----------+------+
| suggest | distance | docs |
+---------+----------+------+
| bag     | 1        | 1    |
+---------+----------+------+

CALL QSUGGEST takes only the last word

If the first parameter is not a single word, but multiple, then CALL SUGGEST will return suggestions only for the last word.

Example:

CALL QSUGGEST('bagg with tasel', 'products');

+---------+----------+------+
| suggest | distance | docs |
+---------+----------+------+
| tassel  | 1        | 1    |
+---------+----------+------+

Adding 1 as sentence makes CALL QSUGGEST return the entire sentence with the last word corrected.

CALL QSUGGEST('bag with tasel', 'products', 1 as sentence);

+-------------------+----------+------+
| suggest           | distance | docs |
+-------------------+----------+------+
| bag with tassel   | 1        | 1    |
+-------------------+----------+------+

Different display mode

The 1 as result_line option changes the way the suggestions are displayed in the output. Instead of showing each suggestion in a separate row, it displays all suggestions, distances, and docs in a single row. Here’s an example to demonstrate this:

Example:

CALL QSUGGEST('bagg with tasel', 'products', 1 as result_line);

+----------+--------+
| name     | value  |
+----------+--------+
| suggests | tassel |
| distance | 1      |
| docs     | 1      |
+----------+--------+

Interactive course

This interactive course demonstrates online how the spell correction feature works on a web page and experiment with different examples.