Error correction through language processing

Abstract

There are two fundamental approaches for error correction. One approach is to add external redundancy to data. The other approach is to use the redundancy inside data, even if it is only the residual redundancy after a data compression algorithm. The first approach, namely error-correcting codes (ECCs), has been studied actively over the past seventy years. In this work, we explore the second approach, and show that it can substantially enhance the error-correction performance. This work focuses on error correction of texts in English as a case study. It proposes a scheme that combines language-based decoding with ECC decoding. Both analysis and experimental results are presented. The scheme can be extended to content-based decoding for more types of data with rich structures.