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This paper describes strategies for automatic recognition of unknown variants of known words in a natural language processing system. The types of lexical variants which are detectable include inflexional aberrations, ad hoc abbreviations and spelling/typographical errors. This technique is independent of any particular grammar or parsing formalism, and can be implemented as a lexical lookup routine which heuristically prunes and orders the list of possible fixes found in the lexicon, then allowing the parser to treat the list of candidates as a set of multiple meanings for a polysemous word.