Spelling correction for data normalization in Java

Posted by dareios on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by dareios
Published on 2010-02-23T10:45:44Z Indexed on 2010/04/03 6:33 UTC
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I am looking for a Java library to do some initial spell checking / data normalization on user generated text content, imagine the interests entered in a Facebook profile.

This text will be tokenized at some point (before or after spell correction, whatever works better) and some of it used as keys to search for (exact match). It would be nice to cut down misspellings and the like to produce more matches. It would be even better if the correction would perform well on tokens longer than just one word, e.g. "trinking coffee" would become "drinking coffee" and not "thinking coffee".

I found the following Java libraries for doing spelling correction:

  1. JAZZY does not seem to be under active development. Also, the dictionary-distance based approach seems inadequate because of the use of non-standard language in social network profiles and multi-word tokens.
  2. APACHE LUCENE seems to have a statistical spell checker that should be much more suited. Question here would how to create a good dictionary? (We are not using Lucene otherwise, so there is no existing index.)

Any suggestions are welcome!

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