Microsoft Bing Launches Speller100
- 16 February, 2021
- Jason Ferry
- SEO experts
Microsoft Bing delighted many SEO experts when they launched Speller100, a large-scale multilingual spelling correction system worldwide. Consisting of a wide variety of spelling correction models, Speller100 helps top SEO experts around the world get relevant traffic for their webpages.
According to Bing’s statistics, about 15 per cent of queries from searchers have misspellings, leading to incorrect or less relevant answers shown on the search results. The search engine company created the most comprehensive spelling correction system to solve this problem.
In A/B testing queries with and without using Speller100, Bing found out that:
- The number of pages without results were reduced by up to 30 per cent.
- The number of times searchers manually changed their queries were reduced by 5 per cent.
- The number of times that searchers clicked on an item on a webpage went up to 70 per cent.
- The number of times searchers clicked on spelling suggestion increased to 67 per cent.
Bing has been prioritising spelling correction ever since, and the search engine is enhancing its spelling correction system by including more languages from around the globe. They said that they’ve expanded their original system of two dozen languages to more than a hundred.
The launching of Speller100 proves that Bing is taking a huge step forward, and this was made possible because of advanced artificial intelligence (AI).
Technology Used On Speller100
Bing used zero-shot learning in AI to improve their spelling correction system. Zero-shot learning helps an AI model accurately correct and learn spelling without additional language-specific labelled training data.
This technology is different from traditional spelling correction systems, which heavily rely on training data to learn a language’s spelling. Relying on training data is not as efficient with regards to the correction of a language’s spelling since the amount of data tends to be insufficient. Zero-shot learning is designed to solve this problem.
With zero-shot learning, the model can learn how to spell in one language and automatically learn how to spell it in different languages. For instance, if the model learns how to spell in English, it can automatically learn how to spell in Dutch, German, Scots, and other languages. Because zero-shot learning is very quick, Speller100 was able to expand to a vast number of languages using only a small amount of data.
Bing also clarified to SEO experts that their spelling correction is different from Natural Language Processing. According to Bing, all spelling errors have two categories: non-word error and real-word error. The former occurs when the word is not in the vocabulary for a given language, while the latter occurs when the word is valid but does not fit the larger context.
The search engine company’s deep learning approach to correct spelling errors is inspired by the BART model from Facebook. However, it is different from BART in that it also addresses a character-level problem. To do this, Speller100 uses character-level mutations, usually called “noise functions”, which mimic spelling errors.
Bing said they designed noise functions to reduce demand on human-labelled annotations, which are often necessary for machine learning, especially for languages that do not have much training data. With this feature, the search engine can use regular text from webpages for their regular web crawling to get a sufficient amount of online information, allowing them to train hundreds of languages.
Work With The Best SEO Experts In The UK
With the new spelling correction system from Bing, SEO is made easier for businesses, allowing their searchers to quickly find their websites without any spelling errors getting in the way. Nevertheless, it is crucial that online companies work with top SEO experts to ensure that they will have a successful digital campaign.
Here at Position1SEO, our experts make sure to use only the latest and most effective white hat tactics, which will bring in a lot of organic traffic and increased sales.
Call us today! Dial 0141 846 0114 or write to us at office@position1seo.co.uk.