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A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

prog21.dadgum.com

71–80 of 154 posts

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#71
I just want to take a moment and point out that Apple’s built in spell checker does not offer suggestions on the simplest errors

I frequently copy and paste a word into Google just to get the correction auto suggested and auto searched for, whereas Apple operating systems will know it is spelled wrong as an unrecognized word but offer no suggestions

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#72

Really, there are two components to a modern spell checker. First, identify the words that are misspelled. Second, offering (good) corrections. This article is really talking about how hard even the first task was when memory was scarce. Offering good suggestions is still non-trivial.

Thank you. This is the perfect way to word this. My blood was kinda boiling reading the article because I've implemented a spell checker and it's sure as hell not trivial.

However, my experience is exactly what you described. I got it to identify / highlight misspelled words in an afternoon, but then I came to suggesting the correction and things got hairy quick.

Also, my spell checker wasn't even "smart" (aware of semantics, context, homophones, etc).

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#73
post #3

Google's spell checker still is a major feat of software engineering ;-) It must handle every language, handle new words constantly being coined, have low enough latency and high enough throughput to run it on every web search. (Well, caching probably solves 2/3 of traffic.)

I find googles spell checking to be the best in the world. Google search is where I go when local spell checkers failed.

Their google search spellchecker is good, but it's ironic that their android / keyboard spell checker is quite literally the worst I have ever used. Years in and it's maybe 5% as accurate as aspell.

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#74
post #5

Here's an article that people might be interested in. It gives a bit more detail: https://web.archive.org/web/20100706052342/http://www.spelli... I'm particularly interested in this one, and I'm curious about how useful something like this would be to use. > The second does not use a dictionary at all (Morris & Cherry 1975). Like the previous method, it divides the text into trigrams, but it creates a table of these,…

Consider that the most often typo I make is "ture" for "true", and "flase" for "false", I'd say this isn't going to catch some common mistakes.

I have a bunch of iab in my vimrc for typos like that because I make them so often.

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#77
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider that the most often typo I make is "ture" for "true", and "flase" for "false", I'd say this isn't going to catch some common mistakes.

I have a bunch of iab in my vimrc for typos like that because I make them so often.

Care to share some? I use vim and have been meaning to try this for years

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#78
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a bunch of iab in my vimrc for typos like that because I make them so often.

Care to share some? I use vim and have been meaning to try this for years

this is an excerpt:

    iab cosnt const  
    iab conts const  
    iab cnost const  
    iab costn const  
    iab retrun return  
    iab inclued include  
    iab inculed include  
    iab inlcude include  
    iab icnlude include  
    iab inculde include

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#79
post #9

This is a rather bad article because it completely misses the real complexity of a spell checker. A spell checker is not simply a list of words, it's a way to check mistakes according to a standard and to point towards ways to fix these mistakes. This not reducible to a look-up in a hashtable. It requires taking into account some complicated things about the definition of a word and the context in which it is written…

And what about the term "spell checker" itself. A routine that checks the validity of witches' spells?

That it can't even identify that it itself is a "spelling checker" illustrates the problem.

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#80
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to share some? I use vim and have been meaning to try this for years

this is an excerpt: iab cosnt const iab conts const iab cnost const iab costn const iab retrun return iab inclued include iab inculed include iab inlcude include iab icnlude include iab inculde include

This is amazing, could you share the full list?
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