Accurate spelling correction is a critical step in modern search interfaces, especially in an era of mobile devices and speech-to-text interfaces. For services that are deployed around the world, this poses a significant challenge for multilingual NLP: spelling errors need to be caught and corrected in all languages, and even in queries that use multiple languages. In this paper, we tackle this challenge using multi-teacher distillation. On our approach, a monolingual teacher model is trained for each language/locale, and these individual models are distilled into a single multilingual student model intended to serve all languages/locales. In experiments using open-source data as well as user data from a worldwide search service, we show that this leads to highly effective spelling correction models that can meet the tight latency requirements of deployed services.
@article{arxiv.2311.11518,
title = {Multi-teacher Distillation for Multilingual Spelling Correction},
author = {Jingfen Zhang and Xuan Guo and Sravan Bodapati and Christopher Potts},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.11518},
year = {2023}
}