Speller100 in Bing: AI for input validation

Jingwen Lu, Jidong Long and Rangan Majumder wrote a blog post about Speller100, Microsoft’s zero-shot spelling correction models that now collectively work across 100+ languages. Speller100 is currently live in production as part of Microsoft’s Bing search engine, where it corrects typos in search queries — it’s what powers the “did you mean…” prompt. Although this feature has been around for English-language search queries for a very long time, Speller100 newly enables it for a whole host of smaller languages. It’s also an interesting case study of how an AI-powered refinement step of user input can significantly improve a product’s overall experience. By A/B testing Speller100 against not having spelling correction, the researchers found that it reduced the number of pages with no results by 30%, and manual query reformatting by 5%; and that it increased the number of clicks on spelling suggestions by 67%, and clicks on any item on the page by 70%.