An automatic spelling correcting algorithm corrects most of the 50,000 misspellings culled from 25,000,000 words of text from seven scientific and scholarly databases. It uses a similarity key to identify words in a large dictionary that are most similar to a particular misspelling, and'then an error-reversal test to select from these the most plausible correction(s).
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Pollock et al. (1984) studied this question.