Abstract
Malapropisms are real-word errors that lead to syntactically correct but semantically implausible text. We report an experiment on detection and correction of Spanish malapropisms. Malapropos words semantically destroy collocations (syntactically connected word pairs) they are in. Thus we detect possible malapropisms as words that do not form semantically plausible collocations with neighboring words. As correction candidates, we select words similar to the suspected one but forming plausible collocations with neighboring words. To judge semantic plausibility of a collocation, we use Google statistics of occurrences of the word combination and of the two words taken apart. Since collocation components can be separated by other words in a sentence, Google statistics is gathered for the most probable distance between them. The statistics is recalculated to a specially defined Semantic Compatibility Index (SCI). Heuristic rules are proposed to signal malapropisms when SCI values are lower than a predetermined threshold and to retain a few highly SCI-ranked correction candidates. Our experiments gave promising results.
Work done under partial support of Mexican Government (CONACyT, SNI, CGEPI-IPN).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bolshakov, I.A., Gelbukh, A.: On Detection of Malapropisms by Multistage Collocation Testing. In: NLDB 2003, GI-Edition, Bonn. LNI, vol. P-29, pp. 28–41 (2003)
Bolshakov, I.A., Gelbukh, A.: Paronyms for Accelerated Correction of Semantic Errors. International Journal on Information Theories and Applications 10, 11–19 (2003)
Keller, F., Lapata, M.: Using the Web to Obtain Frequencies for Unseen Bigram. Computational linguistics 29(3), 459–484 (2003)
Kilgarriff, A., Grefenstette, G.: Introduction to the Special Issue on the Web as Corpus. Computational linguistics 29(3), 333–347 (2003)
Hirst, G., St-Onge, D.: Lexical Chains as Representation of Context for Detection and Corrections of Malapropisms. In: Fellbaum, C. (ed.) WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database, pp. 305–332. MIT Press, Cambridge (1998)
Manning, C., Schütze, H.: Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing. MIT Press, Cambridge (1999)
Mel’čuk, I.: Dependency Syntax: Theory and Practice. SONY Press, NY (1988)
Wermter, J., Hahn, U.: Collocation Extraction Based on Modifiability Statistics. In: Proc. COLING 2004, Geneva, Switzerland, August 2004, pp. 980–986 (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bolshakov, I.A., Galicia-Haro, S.N., Gelbukh, A. (2005). Detection and Correction of Malapropisms in Spanish by Means of Internet Search. In: Matoušek, V., Mautner, P., Pavelka, T. (eds) Text, Speech and Dialogue. TSD 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3658. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11551874_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11551874_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-28789-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31817-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)