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

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

#31

Post by torium »

jimt1234 wrote: post #12

Can confirm. The first time I saw an automatic spellchecker was probably with WordStar around 1989, and it blew me away. How can the computer know all the words? That's insane! Sounds lame, but it's true. It was a different world.

Since you're old enough, here's a question for you. Do you remember if at the time the first spellcheckers were invented, people were negative on spellcheckers, because that would mean that soon people would stop learning how to spell and just general dumbing down?

It seems that anything that helps people gets this reaction these days. On the one hand, the argument 100% resonates with me. On the other hand, spelling isn't really the end, is it? It's just a means to an end, so what's wrong with making the mean easier? Did people worry that you'd stop knowing how to plant potatoes when trading was invented? EDIT: The example doesn't make sense because agriculture is newer than trading, but you got the idea.

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

#32

Post by Twisol »

torium wrote: post #29
keiferski wrote: post #19

Is there a reason why Apple's iPhone spellcheck is often really poor, significantly worse than both LLMs and just...human eyes? I often find myself butchering the spelling of a word in a way where the correct answer is obvious to human eyes (probably because of "typoglycemia" [1]) and an AI LLM immediately understands what I meant to say, but Apple's spellcheck has "No Guesses Found." Does anyone else have this exper…

Wouldn't typoglycemia be lack of typos in your blood? Don't you mean the opposite?

"Hypo", meaning low; "glyc-", meaning sugar; and "emia", meaning of the blood. "Low sugar of the blood". (With apologies to chubbyemu.)

Since "typo" comes from "typography", it roughly means "symbolic". So "typoglycemia" should mean "symbolic sugar of the blood". Low typos in your blood would be "hypotypemia".

I have no idea why "typoglycemia" refers to a human ability to autocorrect, but it brings me joy, so I'm not going to question it ^_^

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

#33

Post by _fqqr »

torium wrote: post #31
jimt1234 wrote: post #12

Can confirm. The first time I saw an automatic spellchecker was probably with WordStar around 1989, and it blew me away. How can the computer know all the words? That's insane! Sounds lame, but it's true. It was a different world.

Since you're old enough, here's a question for you. Do you remember if at the time the first spellcheckers were invented, people were negative on spellcheckers, because that would mean that soon people would stop learning how to spell and just general dumbing down? It seems that anything that helps people gets this reaction these days. On the one hand, the argument 100% resonates with me. On the other hand, spelling…

“The careless, the inept, the spelling disabled will be able to survive in a world of words by relying on computers to conceal their own weaknesses.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1985/06/02/t...

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

#34

Post by bcrl »

keiferski wrote: post #19

Is there a reason why Apple's iPhone spellcheck is often really poor, significantly worse than both LLMs and just...human eyes? I often find myself butchering the spelling of a word in a way where the correct answer is obvious to human eyes (probably because of "typoglycemia" [1]) and an AI LLM immediately understands what I meant to say, but Apple's spellcheck has "No Guesses Found." Does anyone else have this exper…

I'd be happier if the suggested word didn't move between the time I saw it appear and the time my finger touched the screen.

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

#35

Post by Finnucane »

chilipepperhott wrote: post #8

Checking if a word is spelled correctly is easy. It is providing high-quality suggestions that is hard.

As a copyeditor/proofreader, the number of times over the years I've had to fix the low-quality (i.e, wrong) suggestions is quite large. ("he had a small plague on his desk" remains a favorite.)

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

#36

Post by runako »

torium wrote: post #31
jimt1234 wrote: post #12

Can confirm. The first time I saw an automatic spellchecker was probably with WordStar around 1989, and it blew me away. How can the computer know all the words? That's insane! Sounds lame, but it's true. It was a different world.

Since you're old enough, here's a question for you. Do you remember if at the time the first spellcheckers were invented, people were negative on spellcheckers, because that would mean that soon people would stop learning how to spell and just general dumbing down? It seems that anything that helps people gets this reaction these days. On the one hand, the argument 100% resonates with me. On the other hand, spelling…

Not as much with spellcheckers because even when they started to get popular, it was apparent that many people cannot spell English. So it was very natural.

People pushed back on the grammar checks when they landed in Word.

Before that, people pushed back on calculators in secondary schools. This was a huge point of contention all classes except trigonometry, and calculators were definitely not allowed in the SAT/ACT.

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

#38

Post by paol »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #27
yndoendo wrote: post #18

It is 2025 and the best spell checker is a search engine. Numerous time an application will not provide the correct word. Only solution is to try the word in a search engine and try using in a sentence if that fails. In my opinion, this is where ML/AL local model, no internet required, would be the most beneficial today. Even had to use a search engine with, "thoughts and opi" because I forgot how to spell opinion be…

I've had a related idea for a while now. Instead of how LLMs operate by taking the current text and taking the most likely next token, you take your full text and use an LLM to find the likeliness/rank of each token. I'd imagine this creates a heatmap that shows which parts are the most 'surprising'. You wouldn't catch all misspelling, but it could be very useful information to find what flows and what doesn't - or p…

I would like this too. This approach would also fix the most common failure mode of spelling checkers: typos that are accidentally valid words.

I constantly type "form" instead of "from" for example and spelling checkers don't help at all. Even a simple LLM could easily notice out of place words like that. And LLMs also could easily go further and do grammar and style checking.

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

#40

Post by KineticLensman »

torium wrote: post #31
jimt1234 wrote: post #12

Can confirm. The first time I saw an automatic spellchecker was probably with WordStar around 1989, and it blew me away. How can the computer know all the words? That's insane! Sounds lame, but it's true. It was a different world.

Since you're old enough, here's a question for you. Do you remember if at the time the first spellcheckers were invented, people were negative on spellcheckers, because that would mean that soon people would stop learning how to spell and just general dumbing down? It seems that anything that helps people gets this reaction these days. On the one hand, the argument 100% resonates with me. On the other hand, spelling…

I don't remember any particular negative reaction to spell-checkers like the 'calculator panic'.

Perhaps partly because most schoolkids then wouldn't have been using word processors as their main writing tool at school and people using them in a corporate environment were pleased not to make embarrassing errors in their emails.

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