Semisupervised Project Ideas
Christopher Brown
Department of Linguistics
University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station B5100
Austin, TX 78712-0198 USA
chbrown@mail.utexas.edu
Summary
Two very different ideas: 1) A personally-
adaptive spelling correction and style
matching text-entry engine. 2) Collo-
quial/formal classification of texts based
on cross-classification between colloquial
and formal corpora.
1 Spelling Correction
Spelling correction is sub-optimal in many of its
modern implementations. While some text editing
programs allow personal dictionaries, none that I
know of track personal mistake tendencies. Two
treatments of spelling correction algorithms, Juraf-
sky and Martin (2008) and Kukich (1992), describe
various complications of and solutions to the prob-
lem (the latter in much more depth), but neither con-
sider the continuous process of user input in the pro-
duction and correction of errors. Their spellcheck-
ing algorithms assume a completed document and a
cessation of user input.
I propose a more intelligent text entry engine, in
which the errors that contribute to easily corrected
misspellings (by minimum edit distance methods,
for instance) will be incorporated into the model
of edit distances. For example, if a user mistypes
“aling,” the engine will quickly autocorrect it as
“align,” but if the user then mistypes “desing,” the
engine will remember the “ng” → “gn” edit it
performed before, and suggest “design” instead of
“dewing” (my naive iPad suggests “dewing” even
though I make that typo all the time). This might be
more like active learning, but as I understand it, the
difference between active learning and semisuper-
vised learning over a non-finite (continuous?) data
set is that active learning involves the human user
telling the machine what to learn, and semisuper-
vised learning entails the machine inferring what
to learn from the user’s normal behavior (i.e. un-
labeled data); my implementation would be a com-
bination of the two.
2 Colloquial/formal classification
This classifier will train on very large corpora that
are labeled at the global level; I will consider the
LDC’s switchboard corpus or the Simple English
language of Wikipedia as “colloquial,” and New
York Times or Wall Street Journal articles as “for-
mal.” These will be very noisy data sets, but I be-
lieve some traits of formality or colloquialism can be
teased from the documents. Given those two poles
of corpora, I will calculate the distance between
my unlabeled, to-be-classified documents, and doc-
uments in those corpora. Do and Ng (2006) present
an improved algorithm for the “multiclass text clas-
sification task” that seems to be suited to similar
classification between such corpora.1
References
Chuong Do and Andrew Ng. Transfer learning for text classifi-
cation. In Y. Weiss, B. Schölkopf, and J. Platt, editors, Ad-
vances in Neural Information Processing Systems 18, pages
299–306. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006.
Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin. Speech and Language
Processing (2nd Edition), pages 72–79. Prentice Hall, 2 edi-
tion, 2008. ISBN 0131873210.
Karen Kukich. Techniques for automatically cor-
recting words in text. ACM Comput. Surv., 24
(4):377–439, 1992. ISSN 0360-0300. doi:
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/146370.146380.
1
The results section is somewhat opaque to me, but overall it
seems like a reasonable place to start; it was not so easy finding
relevant articles for this idea.