rahmed31 / spellchecker

This repository implements a brute-force spellchecker utilizing the Damerau-Levenshtein edit distance.

About spellchecker.py

Implementing an accurate, brute-force, and dynamically programmed spellchecking program that utilizes the Damerau-Levenshtein string metric for measuring edit distance between two sequences of characters.

How to Write Your Own Test Cases

In the test folder, you will see two different text files called candidate_words.txt and incorrect_words.txt:

• The candidate_words.txt text file can contain an unlimited amount of CORRECTLY spelled words, with each word written on a new line.
• The incorrect_words.txt text file can contain an unlimited amount of INCORRECTLY spelled words, with each word written on a new line. However, each incorrectly spelled word in this list MUST have its correctly spelled counterpart contained somewhere in the candidate_words.txt text file. It doesn't matter where, since the candidate_words.txt file will be randomly shuffled anyway.

In the test folder, you will see a text file called target_words.txt:

• The target_words.txt file will contain the CORRECT spelling of each word contained in the incorrect_words.txt text file, with each being on a new line in the same exact order that you inserted their incorrectly spelled counterparts in the incorrect_words.txt text file. It is important that both the incorrectly and correctly spelled words are in the same order to be able to calculate the accuracy of the spell checker.

To view an example on how to create your own test cases, take a look at the files provided in either folder.

How to Run the Program

Clone the repository. Then enter the folder's directory using your terminal. Finally, simply run python3 spellchecker.py

• The only thing you will need to modify are the files in the test folders if you want to try the program with your own test cases. The program does not need to be touched, unless you'd like to modify the global variable THRESHOLD, which is used as the threshold to find an incorrectly spelled word's closest approximation.
• The incorrectly spelled words in incorrect_words.txt will be run through the program to find its closest lexical match from the candidate_words.txt text file using the Damerau-Levenshtein algorithm.
• The spellchecked words will then be, in order, cross checked against its intended counterparts in target_words.txt to calculate the overall accuracy of the spellchecking algorithm.

The results of the program will then be printed to your terminal.

Dependencies

Ensure that you have difflib installed for python3.

Final Words

Feel free to use or modify this program for your intended purposes!