Analysis of English Spelling Errors in a Word-Typing Game

The emergence of the web has necessitated the need to detect and correct noisy consumer-generated texts. Most of the previous studies on English spelling-error extraction collected English spelling errors from web services such as Twitter by using the edit distance or from input logs utilizing crowdsourcing. However, in the former approach, it is not clear which word corresponds to the spelling error, and the latter approach requires an annotation cost for the crowdsourcing. One notable exception is Rodrigues and Rytting (2012), who proposed to extract English spelling errors by using a word-typing game. Their approach saves the cost of crowdsourcing, and guarantees an exact alignment between the word and the spelling error. However, they did not assert whether the extracted spelling error corpora reflect the usual writing process such as writing a document. Therefore, we propose a new correctable word-typing game that is more similar to the actual writing process. Experimental results showed that we can regard typing-game logs as a source of spelling errors.