Abstract

In the work reported here, we describe a phonetic spell-checking algorithm, Phonetex which integrates aspects of Soundex and its extension Phonix. It is designed to provide a phonetic component for an existing typographic spell checker. We increase the number of letter codes compared to Soundex and Phonix. We also integrate phonetic rules but use far less than Phonix which was designed for South African name matching or Rogers and Willett's Phonix extension which was designed for 17th century spellings as these includes many rules that are redundant in a contemporary word-based domain. We evaluate our algorithm by comparing it to phonetic spell checkers, Soundex and Editex and four benchmark spell checkers (Agrep, MS Word 97 & 2000 and UNIX `ispell') using a list of phonetic spelling errors. We nd that our approach has superior recall (accuracy) to the alternative approaches although the higher recall is at the expense of precision (number of possible matches retrieved). We intend to integrate it into an existing spell checker so the precision will be improved by integration thus high recall is the aim for our approach in this paper. Keywords: Data Cleaning, Phonetic Spell Checker, Phonetic Code Generation. 1

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