Spelling Suggestions for Conjoined Words

algorithm, language-agnostic, spell-checking

Solution

I imagine the candidate conjoined word will not be longer than forty (40) characters or so; most of the time it will be less than ten (10).

Considering the small size, what about this pseudocode?

if (is_spelled_wrong(word)):
    N = len(word)
    list_suggestions = []
    for i = 1 to N-1:
        wordA = word[0:i] // Pythonic 'slice' notation
        wordB = word[i+1:N]
        if (!is_spelled_wrong(wordA) && !is_spelled_wrong(wordB))
            list_suggestions.appened((wordA, wordB))

In other words, just scan the string for all possibilities. There are a small number of them. In the case of "areyou", you would loop five (5) times.

Problem

I am working on implementing a spell check function for a web-based WYSIWYG editor. I am currently using the Damerau-Levenshtein distance algorithm to produce a list of spelling suggestions. This is all working out nicely, but I am curious as to how I might improve the functionality. Specifically, my implementation does not currently handle conjoined words. For instance, I would like to be able to detect "areyou" and suggest "are you" instead. I think I can do this by breaking the potentially conjoined word apart at likely looking segments and testing both halves. Since all English words must have at least one vowel, I think I can look for vowels to help me decide where to break words apart. The Damerau-Levenshtein distance algorithm was so useful; it is clear that others have put a lot more thought into this than I have. Is there a similarly clever algorithm that I should consider for detecting conjoined words, or am I on the right track already?

Original source