Paronyms for Accelerated Correction of Semantic Errors

* Work done under partial support of Mexican Government (CONACyT, SNI), IPN (CGPI, COFAA) and Korean Government (KIPA Professorship for Visiting Faculty Positions). The second author is currently on Sabbatical leave at Chung-Ang University.

The errors usually made by authors during text preparation are classified. The notion of semantic errors is elaborated, and malapropisms are pointed among them as “similar” to the intended word but essentially distorting the meaning of the text. For whatever method of malapropism correction, we propose to beforehand compile dictionaries of paronyms, i.e. of words similar to each other in letters, sounds or morphs. The proposed classification of errors and paronyms is illustrated by English and Russian examples being valid for many languages. Specific dictionaries of literal and morphemic paronyms are compiled for Russian. It is shown that literal paronyms drastically cut down (up to 360 times) the search of correction candidates, while morphemic paronyms permit to correct errors not studied so far and characteristic for foreigners.