Comment by dextorious
14 years ago
"""The sentence contains misspelled words."""
No, it contains correctly spelled words used in place of other desired words.
"I sea your eyes", "I she your eyes"
If you want to correct these kind of errors, you must now a lot about natural language. Also, the above are trivial cases. There are tons of edge cases and far more difficult distinctions. Here's an amusing one, that can lead to "Microsoft paperclip" like interactions:
"I gave him the new pink dress as a present" => "I gave her the new pink dress as a present"
No, idiotic spell-checker, I do mean him. My friend is a cross-dresser, shut up and let me type.
Such a spellchecker would also be useless for poetry. And if you find poetry obscure, so it doesn't really matter, then such a spellchecker would also be useless for irony. Suddenly, you lose all the hipsters from your potential users (except if they start using it ironically).
Anyway, no spell checker in widespread use attempts this --and it's probably a very hard nut to crack, and probably uncrackable in the general case.
> No, it contains correctly spelled words used in place of other desired words.
If you intend to write a word meaning "actually existing as a thing" and spell it "reel", it is monstrously unlikely that you genuinely thought a word meaning "a cylinder on which flexible materials can be wound" was a suitable substitute. If you did, that would be the use of a correctly spelled (but incorrectly selected) word in place of a desired word: a grammatical error, in other words. However, if you just pick the wrong letters to construct a phoneme, as is almost certainly the case here... yep, that's a spelling error.
To put it another way, imagine that the word "reel" didn't actually exist, and I make precisely the same error, substituting an 'e' for an 'a'. All of a sudden, by your argument, what was a grammatical error is now a spelling error. But the mistake I made hasn't changed, so that makes no sense.
> If you want to correct these kind of errors, you must now a lot about natural language. >... > Anyway, no spell checker in widespread use attempts this
So? The category of error doesn't change with how difficult it is to fix.