Text segmentation for Chinese spell checking

Chinese spell checking is different from its counterparts for Western languages because Chinese words in texts are not separated by spaces. Chinese spell checking in this article refers to how to identify the misuse of characters in text composition. In other words, it is error correction at the word level rather than at the character level. Before Chinese sentences are spell checked, the text is segmented into semantic units. Error detection can then be carried out on the segmented text based on thesaurus and grammar rules. Segmentation is not a trivial process due to ambiguities in the Chinese language and errors in texts. Because it is not practical to define all Chinese words in a dictionary, words not predefined must also be dealt with. The number of word combinations increases exponentially with the length of the sentence. In this article, a Block‐of‐Combinations (BOC) segmentation method based on frequency of word usage is proposed to reduce the word combinations from exponential growth to linear growth. From experiments carried out on Hong Kong newspapers, BOC can correctly solve 10% more ambiguities than the Maximum Match segmentation method. To make the segmentation more suitable for spell checking, user interaction is also suggested.