The York Research Database

In this paper, we propose a simple and flexible spell checker using efficient associative matching in the AURA modular neural system. Our approach aims to provide a pre-processor for an information retrieval (IR) system allowing the user's query to be checked against a lexicon and any spelling errors corrected, to prevent wasted searching. IR searching is computationally intensive so much so that if we can prevent futile searches we can minimise computational cost. We evaluate our approach against several commonly used spell checking techniques for memory-use, retrieval speed and recall accuracy. The proposed methodology has low memory use, high speed for word presence checking, reasonable speed for spell checking and a high recall rate.