Spell Checkers « Vincent Gable’s Blog

February 9, 2009

No Ducking Way!

Filed under: Design,Quotes,Uncategorized | Diction, Failure, iPhone, Microsoft, Profanity, Spell Checkers
― Vincent Gable on February 9, 2009

I’ve finally found an example of, someone intentionally typing “ducking” on their iPhone,

Plotting routes to meetings based on who I’m currently ducking. It’s good for exercise. Also that time iPhone was correct- I meant ducking.

Obviously we can’t have a spellchecker suggesting profanity. But is it really so wrong to just leave it alone? Can we trust that if someone says something that strongly they really meant it?

Word 2008 seems to try, bless it’s heart. It won’t suggest or correct, “Mike Lee” (at least when it’s written as two words).

But it still can’t stand one of the heavy seven (original MP3). Word gives it the scarlet underline. That strikes me as odd. I wish I knew the story behind it. Is it actually a dangerously common typo? Is it statistically more taboo? Did someone just make a Puritan judgement call, and decide people wanted to be corrected for writing it? (UPDATE 2009-11-18: apparently it is the worst swear word in the World, at least according to that cute story.)

Ask yourself, are obscenity filters a Bad Idea, or an Incredibly Intercoursing Bad Idea?

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Now Recognizing President Barrack Abeam

Filed under: Design,Programming,Usability | Barack Obama, Failure, Firefox, Futurism, Mac OS X, Microsoft, Spell Checkers
― Vincent Gable on February 9, 2009

President “Barack Obama” is not recognized by my Mac’s spellchecker. Firefox, Microsoft Word¹, Mac OS X — each of them has a built in spellchecker, and none of them know how to say our president’s name. Spell checker dictionaries need to be updated more frequently — to keep up with the emails we write.

Things have improved since 1995, but there’s still a long way to go.

There’s more to say about how to fix things, but someone has already said it. The future looks bright,

(Microsoft) now scans through trillions of words, including anonymized text from Hotmail messages, in the hunt for dictionary candidates. On top of this, they monitor words that people manually instruct Word to recognize. “It’s becoming rarer and rarer that anything that comes to us ad hoc isn’t already on our list” from Hotmail or user data, Calcagno says. According to a July 14, 2006, bug report, for example, the Natural Language Group harvested the following words that had appeared more than 10 times in Hotmail user dictionaries: Netflix, Radiohead, Lipitor, glucosamine, waitressing, taekwondo, and all-nighter.

I think the next step in spellchecking is to follow Mac OS X’s lead, and adopt a system-wide spellchecker. When there’s only one instance of a spellchecker running (not a separate one for every program that might work with text) we can make it much smarter, without requiring a supercomputer.

¹

Microsoft added Barack and Obama to Office’s dictionary back in April 2007, but unfortunately, that change hasn’t yet made it to the ~~Mac Ghetto~~, ahem, “Mac BU”. Or at least I haven’t seen it in Word yet.

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