Patent ID: 7366983
Filing Date: 2008-04-29
Classification: G06F,G10L

Abstract:
1. A method comprising: receiving an entered string; determining how likely a word w may be incorrectly entered as a string s based on partitioning the word w and the string s; computing probabilities for various partitionings to determine a highest likelihood of at least one edit operation that converts a first character sequence of arbitrary length in the word w to a second character sequence of arbitrary length in the string s; implementing edit operations consisting of insertion, deletion, substitution, matching, transposition, doubling, and halving; implementing an edit to be conditioned on a probability of a position that the edit occurs, P(α→β|PSN), wherein edit operations are characterized as α→β, where α is one character sequence of zero or more characters, β is another character sequence of zero or more characters, PSN describes positional information about a substring within the word, including the position may be a start of a word, an end of a word, or some other location within the word (PSN ={start of word, end of word, other}); wherein edits operations are not constrained or limited to a specified set of changes; adding a start-of-word symbol and an end-of-word symbol to each word to provide the positional information; and identifying misspelled words, wherein the misspelled words may be potentially corrected to an appropriate spelling.