Spell Checker for Python

Question

I'm fairly new to Python and NLTK. I am busy with an application that can perform spell checks (replaces an incorrectly spelled word with the correct one). I'm currently using the Enchant library on Python 2.7, PyEnchant and the NLTK library. The code below is a class that handles the correction/replacement.

from nltk.metrics import edit_distance

class SpellingReplacer:
    def __init__(self, dict_name='en_GB', max_dist=2):
        self.spell_dict = enchant.Dict(dict_name)
        self.max_dist = 2

    def replace(self, word):
        if self.spell_dict.check(word):
            return word
        suggestions = self.spell_dict.suggest(word)

        if suggestions and edit_distance(word, suggestions[0]) <= self.max_dist:
            return suggestions[0]
        else:
            return word

I have written a function that takes in a list of words and executes replace() on each word and then returns a list of those words, but spelled correctly.

def spell_check(word_list):
    checked_list = []
    for item in word_list:
        replacer = SpellingReplacer()
        r = replacer.replace(item)
        checked_list.append(r)
    return checked_list

>>> word_list = ['car', 'colour']
>>> spell_check(words)
['car', 'color']

Now, I don't really like this because it isn't very accurate and I'm looking for a way to achieve spelling checks and replacements on words. I also need something that can pick up spelling mistakes like "caaaar"? Are there better ways to perform spelling checks out there? If so, what are they? How does Google do it? Because their spelling suggester is very good.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You can use the autocorrect lib to spell check in python.
Example Usage:

from autocorrect import Speller

spell = Speller(lang='en')

print spell('caaaar')
print spell('mussage')
print spell('survice')
print spell('hte')

Result:

caesar
message
service
the