Spelling Error Patterns in Spanish for Word Processing Applications

This paper reports findings from the elaboration of a typology of spelling errors for Spanish. It also discusses previous generalizations about spelling error patterns found in other studies and offers new insights on them. The typology is based on the analysis of around 76K misspellings found in real-life texts produced by humans. The main goal of the elaboration of the typology was to help in the implementation of a spell checker that detects context-independent misspellings in general unrestricted texts with the most common confusion pairs (i.e. error/correction pairs) to improve the set of ranked correction candidates for misspellings. We found that spelling errors are language dependent and are closely related to the orthographic rules of each language. The statistical data we provide on spelling error patterns in Spanish and their comparison with other data in other related works are the novel contribution of this paper. In this line, this paper shows that some of the general statements found in the literature about spelling error patterns apply mainly to English and cannot be extrapolated to other languages.