Forms of spelling correction

We focus on two specific forms of spelling correction that we refer to as isolated-term correction and context-sensitive correction. In isolated-term correction, we attempt to correct a single query term at a time - even when we have a multiple-term query. The carot example demonstrates this type of correction. Such isolated-term correction would fail to detect, for instance, that the query flew form Heathrow contains a mis-spelling of the term from - because each term in the query is correctly spelled in isolation.

We begin by examining two techniques for addressing isolated-term correction: edit distance, and $k$-gram overlap. We then proceed to context-sensitive correction.