12.2.9 Spell Checking and Correction

  • For natural language processing tasks, it’s important that the text be free of spelling errors
  • A Word’s spellcheck method returns a list of tuples containing possible correct spellings and confidence values
  • Assume we meant to type “they” but misspelled it as “theyr”
In [1]:
from textblob import Word
In [2]:
word = Word('theyr')
In [3]:
word.spellcheck()
Out[3]:
[('they', 0.5713042216741622), ('their', 0.42869577832583783)]
In [4]:
word.correct()  # chooses word with the highest confidence value
Out[4]:
'they'
  • Word with the highest confidence value might not be the correct word for the given context
  • TextBlobs, Sentences and Words all have a correct method that you can call to correct spelling
  • Calling correct on a Word returns the correctly spelled word that has the highest confidence value
In [5]:
from textblob import TextBlob
In [6]:
sentence = TextBlob('Ths sentense has missplled wrds.')
In [7]:
sentence.correct()
Out[7]:
TextBlob("The sentence has misspelled words.")

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