A question on StackOverflow really sparked my attention. The aim was to clean up a dataset of inappropriately spaced words. For example:

> word5 <- "hotter the doghou se would be bec ause the co lor was diffe rent"

My approach was to create what I call a wordpair object. The word pair object for the example sentence looks like:

> abc1_pairs
    word1  word2
1  hotter    the
2     the doghou
3  doghou     se
4      se  would
5   would     be
6      be    bec
7     bec   ause
8    ause    the
9     the    col
10    col     or
11     or    was
12    was  diffe
13  diffe   rent

Then we iterate over the word pairs, and check if they are correct words using the aspell function in R, and recursively keep merging words until no new correct words can be found. The code I created to create the wordpair object, transform a wordpair back to a list of words, and some additional functions can be found at the end of this post.

Applied to the example dataset this would result in:

> word5 <- "hotter the doghou se would be bec ause the col or was diffe rent"
> abc1 = strsplit(word5, split = " ")[[1]]
> abc1_pairs = wordlist2wordpairs(abc1)
> abc1_pairs
    word1  word2
1  hotter    the
2     the doghou
3  doghou     se
4      se  would
5   would     be
6      be    bec
7     bec   ause
8    ause    the
9     the    col
10    col     or
11     or    was
12    was  diffe
13  diffe   rent
> abc1_merged_pairs = merge_wordpairs(abc1_pairs)
Number of words about to be merged in this pass: 4
> merged_sentence = paste(wordpairs2wordlist(abc1_merged_pairs), collapse = " ")
> c(word5, merged_sentence)
[1] "hotter the doghou se would be bec ause the col or was diffe rent"
[2] "hotter the doghouse would be because the color was different"

# A bunch of functions
# Data transformation
wordlist2wordpairs = function(word_list) {
  require(plyr)
  wordpairs = ldply(seq_len(length(word_list) - 1), 
                    function(idx) 
                      return(c(word_list[idx], 
                               word_list[idx+1])))
  names(wordpairs) = c("word1", "word2")
  return(wordpairs)
}
wordpairs2wordlist = function(wordpairs) {
  return(c(wordpairs[[1]], wordpairs[[2]][nrow(wordpairs)]))
}

# Some checking functions
# Is the word correct?
word_correct = function(word) return(nrow(aspell(factor(word))) == 0)
# Merge two words
merge_word = function(word1, word2) return(paste(word1, word2, sep = ""))

# Merge a specific pair, option to postpone deletion of pair
merge_specific_pair = function(wordpairs, idx, delete_pair = TRUE) {
  # merge pair into word
  merged_word = do.call("merge_word", wordpairs[idx,])
  # assign the pair to the idx above
  if(!(idx == 1)) wordpairs[idx - 1, "word2"] = merged_word
  if(!(idx == nrow(wordpairs))) wordpairs[idx + 1, "word1"] = merged_word
  # assign the pair to the index below (if not last one)
  if(delete_pair) wordpairs = wordpairs[-idx,]
  return(wordpairs)
}

# Recursively delete wordpairs which lead to a correct word
merge_wordpairs = function(wordpairs) {
  require(plyr)
  merged_pairs = as.character(mlply(wordpairs, merge_word))
  correct_words_idxs = which(sapply(merged_pairs, word_correct))
  if(length(correct_words_idxs) == 0) {
    return(wordpairs)
  } else {
    message(sprintf("Number of words about to be merged in this pass: %s", length(correct_words_idxs)))
    for(idx in correct_words_idxs) {
      wordpairs = merge_specific_pair(wordpairs, idx, delete_pair = FALSE)
    }
    return(merge_wordpairs(wordpairs[-correct_words_idxs,])) # recursive call
  }

}