Evaluating Automatic Detection of Misspellings in German
his study investigates the performance of a spell checker designed for native writers on misspellings made by second language (L2) learners. It addresses two research questions: 1) What is the correction rate of a generic spell checker for L2 misspellings? 2) What factors influence the correction ra...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
National Foreign Language Resource Center
2008-10-01
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| Series: | Language Learning and Technology |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://llt.msu.edu/vol12num3/rimrottheift.pdf |
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| Summary: | his study investigates the performance of a spell checker designed for native writers on misspellings made by second language (L2) learners. It addresses two research questions: 1) What is the correction rate of a generic spell checker for L2 misspellings? 2) What factors influence the correction rate of a generic spell checker for L2 misspellings? To explore these questions, the study considers a corpus of 1,027 unique misspellings from 48 Anglophone learners of German and classifies these along three error taxonomies: linguistic competence (competence versus performance misspellings), linguistic subsystem (lexical, morphological or phonological misspellings), and target modification (single-edit misspellings (edit distance = one) versus multiple-edit misspellings (edit distance > 1)). The study then evaluates the performance of the Microsoft Word® spell checker on these misspellings. Results indicate that only 62% of the L2 misspellings are corrected and that the spell checker, independent of other factors, generally cannot correct multiple-edit misspellings although it is quite successful in correcting single-edit errors. In contrast to most misspellings by native writers, many L2 misspellings are multiple-edit errors and are thus not corrected by a spell checker designed for native writers. The study concludes with computational and pedagogical suggestions to enhance spell checking in CALL. |
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| ISSN: | 1094-3501 |