Unsupervised context-sensitive spelling correction of English and Dutch clinical free-text with word and character n-gram embeddings

Abstract: We present an unsupervised context-sensitive spelling correction method for clinical free-text that uses word and character n-gram embeddings. Our method generates misspelling replacement candidates and ranks them according to their semantic fit, by calculating a weighted cosine similarity between the vectorized representation of a candidate and the misspelling context. To tune the parameters of this model, we generate self-induced spelling error corpora. We perform our experiments for two languages. For English, we greatly outperform off-the-shelf spelling correction tools on a manu... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Fivez, Pieter
Suster, Simon
Daelemans, Walter
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
Schlagwörter: Linguistics
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-29031340
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://hdl.handle.net/10067/1464290151162165141

Abstract: We present an unsupervised context-sensitive spelling correction method for clinical free-text that uses word and character n-gram embeddings. Our method generates misspelling replacement candidates and ranks them according to their semantic fit, by calculating a weighted cosine similarity between the vectorized representation of a candidate and the misspelling context. To tune the parameters of this model, we generate self-induced spelling error corpora. We perform our experiments for two languages. For English, we greatly outperform off-the-shelf spelling correction tools on a manually annotated MIMIC-III test set, and counter the frequency bias of a noisy channel model, showing that neural embeddings can be successfully exploited to improve upon the state-of-the-art. For Dutch, we also outperform an off-the-shelf spelling correction tool on manually annotated clinical records from the Antwerp University Hospital, but can offer no empirical evidence that our method counters the frequency bias of a noisy channel model in this case as well. However, both our context-sensitive model and our implementation of the noisy channel model obtain high scores on the test set, establishing a state-of-the-art for Dutch clinical spelling correction with the noisy channel model.1