Automatic Spelling Detection and Correction in the Medical Domain: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Automatic spelling correction is one of the most important problems in natural language processing. Its difficulty increases in medical corpora, due to the intrinsic particularities that have these texts. These features include the use of specific terminology, abbreviations, acronyms and the presence of writing errors. In this article we present a systematic review of the literature on automatic spelling detection and correction for the medical domain. There are many works on detection and automatic correction, but there is no review delving into the process of automatic correction in the medical domain. Therefore, we intend to synthesize all the existing information on this research topic and the types of studies that have been carried out to date. We present the main techniques and resources, and finally also the limitations and specific challenges. The results reflect the importance of compiling an exhaustive dictionary. In addition, the results show the ordinary use of distance algorithms of spelling and phonetic similarity, as well as with statistical techniques. The improvement of performance in recent years is especially relevant because of the use of context-based methods, such as linguistic models or neural embeddings.