Experience

Hunspell is a morphological spell checker and automatic corrector for Macintosh 10.6 and later versions. Aspell is a general spell checker and automatic corrector for the GNU operating system. In this experience article, we present a benchmarking study of the performance of Hunspell and Aspell. Ginger is a general grammatical spell checker that is used as a baseline to compare the performance of Hunspell and Aspell. A benchmark dataset was carefully selected to be a mixture of different error types at different word length levels. Further, the benchmarking data are from very bad spellers and will challenge any spell checker. The extensive study described in this work will characterize the respective softwares and benchmarking data from multiple perspectives and will consider many error statistics. Overall, Hunspell can correct 415/469 words and Aspell can correct 414/469 words. The baseline Ginger can correct 279/469 words. We recommend this dataset as the preferred benchmark dataset for evaluating newly developed “isolated word” spell checkers.