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Personalized Online Spell Correction for Personal Search

Published: 13 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Spell correction is a must-have feature for any modern search engine in applications such as web or e-commerce search. Typical spell correction solutions used in production systems consist of large indexed lookup tables based on a global model trained across many users over a large scale web corpus or a query log.
For search over personal corpora, such as email, this global solution is not sufficient, as it ignores the user's personal lexicon. Without personalization, global spelling fails to correct tail queries drawn from a user's own, often idiosyncratic, lexicon. Personalization using existing algorithms is difficult due to resource constraints and unavailability of sufficient data to build per-user models.
In this work, we propose a simple and effective personalized spell correction solution that augments existing global solutions for search over private corpora. Our event driven spell correction candidate generation method is specifically designed with personalization as the key construct. Our novel spell correction and query completion algorithms do not require complex model training and is highly efficient. The proposed solution has shown over 30% click-through rate gain on affected queries when evaluated against a range of strong commercial personal search baselines - Google's Gmail, Drive, and Calendar search production systems.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Temporal Blind Spots in Large Language ModelsProceedings of the 17th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining10.1145/3616855.3635818(683-692)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2024
  • (2022)Search and Discovery in Personal Email CollectionsProceedings of the Fifteenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining10.1145/3488560.3501393(1617-1619)Online publication date: 11-Feb-2022
  • (2021)Exploiting the Logits: Joint Sign Language Recognition and Spell-Correction2020 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR)10.1109/ICPR48806.2021.9412952(5246-5253)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2021
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Other conferences
WWW '19: The World Wide Web Conference
May 2019
3620 pages
ISBN:9781450366748
DOI:10.1145/3308558
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • IW3C2: International World Wide Web Conference Committee

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 13 May 2019

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Author Tags

  1. Spell correction
  2. personal search
  3. personalization

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  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

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WWW '19
WWW '19: The Web Conference
May 13 - 17, 2019
CA, San Francisco, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Temporal Blind Spots in Large Language ModelsProceedings of the 17th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining10.1145/3616855.3635818(683-692)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2024
  • (2022)Search and Discovery in Personal Email CollectionsProceedings of the Fifteenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining10.1145/3488560.3501393(1617-1619)Online publication date: 11-Feb-2022
  • (2021)Exploiting the Logits: Joint Sign Language Recognition and Spell-Correction2020 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR)10.1109/ICPR48806.2021.9412952(5246-5253)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2021
  • (2020)Guiding the selection of child spellchecker suggestions using audio and visual cuesProceedings of the Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3392063.3394390(398-408)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2020
  • (2020)Parameter Tuning in Personal Search SystemsProceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining10.1145/3336191.3371820(97-105)Online publication date: 20-Jan-2020

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