Beyond Detection: Ethical Foundations for Automated Dyslexic Error Attribution
About
Dyslexic spelling errors exhibit systematic phonological and orthographic patterns that distinguish them from the errors produced by typically developing writers. While this observation has motivated dyslexic-specific spell-checking and assistive writing tools, prior work has focused predominantly on error correction rather than attribution, and has largely neglected the ethical risks. The risk of harmful labelling, covert screening, algorithmic bias, and institutional misuse that automated classification of learners entails requires the development of robust ethical and legal frameworks for research in this area. This paper addresses both gaps. We formulate dyslexic error attribution as a binary classification task. Given a misspelt word and its correct target form, determine whether the error pattern is characteristic of a dyslexic or non-dyslexic writer. We develop a comprehensive feature set capturing orthographic, phonological, and morphological properties of each error, and propose a twin-input neural model evaluated against traditional machine learning baselines under writer-independent conditions. The neural model achieves 93.01% accuracy and an F1-score of 94.01%, with phonetically plausible errors and vowel confusions emerging as the strongest attribution signals. We situate these technical results within an explicit ethics-first framework, analysing fairness across subgroups, the interpretability requirements of educational deployment, and the conditions, consent, transparency, human oversight, and recourse, under which a system could be responsibly used. We provide concrete guidelines for ethical deployment and an open discussion of the systems limitations and misuse potential. Our results demonstrate that dyslexic error attribution is feasible at high accuracy while underscoring that feasibility alone is insufficient for deployment in high-stakes educational contexts.