Comment by efitz
2 months ago
No. Spell check frequently still gets things wrong if the word is spelled correctly and the sentence is grammatically correct but the wrong word was used.
2 months ago
No. Spell check frequently still gets things wrong if the word is spelled correctly and the sentence is grammatically correct but the wrong word was used.
Can you give me an example? Spell check only checks if a word is in dictionary. It doesn’t check grammar or context.
"Bob went to Venice to pick up the doge."
Where doge is both the name of a title (like duke) but it is misspelt "dog". The use of "Venice" where doge's are could increase a the likelihood of a smarter spell check keeping doge and not correcting to dog. Looking at a wider context might see that Bob is talking about a pupper.
A simpler example would be "spell cheque"
A spelling error, using one dictionary definition, is "an error in the conventionally accepted form of spelling a word" --- mistaking one word for another does not fall under this definition. It is true that we now expect spell checkers to do grammatical checking as well, but a pure spell checker can indeed rely on a wordlist for English (this wouldn't work in languages with more developed morphology and/or frequent compounding).
5 replies →
Finnish would like a word. Take a random noun like kauppa "shop". It has at least 6000 forms: https://flammie.github.io/omorfi/genkau3.html and that's excluding compounds (written as one word in Finnish) like "bookshop" or "shop-manager" etc. etc. And then you have loan words and slang, derivations into other words classes; all of this is impossible to compactly represent in a full-form word list.
Now consider the many other languages of that family ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages ) – they also have this extreme potential for inflections, but next to no online resources to train language models on or even scrape decent wordlists from.
Finnish is very different from most other languages, and does not have the user base to be well represented in training data, but that webpage is ridiculous and does not reflect the actual language. No one in the history of Finnish has ever spoken most of those forms. Grammar describes language, it does not define it!
"would like a word". I see what you did there...
That's exactly what they're saying. If you write “the work required deep incite”, a traditional spell checker won't catch the mistake (but people consider it a spelling error).
Cue people mistaking cue for queue
Butt wouldn't you liked if a spell cheque could of fixed these command?
Hah! Apple caught "of" and suggested "consider have instead", but left the rest untouched. Great qed for spell checkers.
Chatgpt fixed it though: "But wouldn't you like it if a spell check could have fixed these commands?"