Query spelling correction using multi-task learning

Abstract

This paper explores the use of online multi-task learning for search query spelling correction, by effectively transferring information from different and biased training datasets for improving spelling correction across datasets. Experiments were conducted on three query spelling correction datasets, including the well-known TREC benchmark data. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method considerably outperforms existing baseline systems in terms of accuracy. Importantly, the proposed method is about one-order of magnitude faster than baseline systems in terms of training speed. In contrast to existing methods which typically require more than (e.g.,) 50 training passes, our algorithm can very closely approach the empirical optimum in around five passes.