Spelling Correction in Healthcare Query-Answer Systems: Methods, Retrieval Impact, and Empirical Evaluation

Abstract

Healthcare question-answering (QA) systems face a persistent challenge: users submit queries with spelling errors at rates substantially higher than those found in the professional documents they search. This paper presents the first controlled study of spelling correction as a retrieval preprocessing step in healthcare QA using real consumer queries. We conduct an error census across two public datasets -- the TREC 2017 LiveQA Medical track (104 consumer health questions) and HealthSearchQA (4,436 health queries from Google autocomplete) -- finding that 61.5% of real medical queries contain at least one spelling error, with a token-level error rate of 11.0%. We evaluate four correction methods -- conservative edit distance, standard edit distance (Levenshtein), context-aware candidate ranking, and SymSpell -- across three experimental conditions: uncorrected queries against an uncorrected corpus (baseline), uncorrected queries against a corrected corpus, and fully corrected queries against a corrected corpus. Using BM25 and TF-IDF cosine retrieval over 1,935 MedQuAD answer passages with TREC relevance judgments, we find that query correction substantially improves retrieval -- edit distance and context-aware correction achieve MRR improvements of +9.2% and NDCG@10 improvements of +8.3% over the uncorrected baseline. Critically, correcting only the corpus without correcting queries yields minimal improvement (+0.5% MRR), confirming that query-side correction is the key intervention. We complement these results with a 100-sample error analysis categorising correction outcomes per method and provide evidence-based recommendations for practitioners.