An overview of the goals of English orthography counters the misconception that its spelling is chaotic and unprincipled. Direct representation of the speaker’s phonemes is not its only goal. But even the sound-to-letter correspondences are not as inconsistent as widely believed. A survey of first-grade text vocabulary shows that spelling consistency is increased significantly if one takes into...

Errors, even at the spelling level, can provide useful insight into the nature of a written text. This paper presents a classification of spelling errors in Web texts based on their causes (misspellings, typos and intentional deviations), linking them to the attitudes of their authors and the circumstances of their writing. Examples are drawn from blog and forum entries in English and Italian.

This paper describes an XML annotation scheme for English Language Learner (ELL) spelling errors in learner corpora which can be used to create standardized, annotated ELL error corpora for use by researchers who are developing spelling correction tools for ELLs. We also provide an error taxonomy (with examples of each error type) upon which the scheme was based.

Context-sensitive spelling correction is the task of correcting spelling errors which result in valid words. We present work in progress where we adapt established methods from English to a morphologically rich language and conclude that the rich morphology negatively affects performance. However, our system is still good enough to be useful in regular word processing.

Spelling-checkers have become an integral part of most text processing software. From different reasons among which the speed of processing prevails they are usually based on dictionaries of word forms instead of words. This approach is sufficient for languages with little inflection such as English, but fails for highly inflective languages such as Czech, Russian, Slovak or other Slavonic lang...

We propose a method for modeling pronunciation variation in the context of spell checking for non-native writers of English. Spell checkers, typically developed for native speakers, fail to address many of the types of spelling errors peculiar to non-native speakers, especially those errors influenced by differences in phonology. Our model of pronunciation variation is used to extend a pronounc...

The most commonly used string similarity measure for spelling correction is minimum edit distance (MED), which is based solely on the orthographic similarity between two strings. In order to overcome this shortcoming, this paper presents a more sophisticated similarity measure that considers both the orthographic and phonetic similarity between two strings. To demonstrate the effectiveness of t...

This study investigated the effects of a 12-week language-enriched phonological awareness instruction on 76 Hong Kong young children who were learning English as a second language. The children were assigned randomly to receive the instruction on phonological awareness skills embedded in vocabulary learning activities or comparison instruction which consisted of vocabulary learning and writing ...