Unsupervised Context-Sensitive Spelling Correction of English and Dutch Clinical Free-Text with Word and Character N-Gram Embeddings

Authors

  • Pieter Fivez CLiPS, University of Antwerp
  • Simon Šuster CLiPS, University of Antwerp
  • Walter Daelemans CLiPS, University of Antwerp

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.

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Published

2017-12-01

How to Cite

Fivez, P., Šuster, S., & Daelemans, W. (2017). Unsupervised Context-Sensitive Spelling Correction of English and Dutch Clinical Free-Text with Word and Character N-Gram Embeddings. Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands Journal, 7, 39–52. Retrieved from https://www.clinjournal.org/clinj/article/view/67

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