| ▲ | thinkingemote 2 days ago |
| "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" |
|
| ▲ | macleginn 2 days ago | parent [-] |
| 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). |
| |
| ▲ | kmacdough 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Ok, but this is a technicality. Spell-checkers have slowly evolved into grammar checkers and what people really want is error correction. Whether people call it a spell checker a minor language issue (and the kind of things humans do all the time). When teaching for your dictionary, ask: "is it obvious what they mean if I'm not being pedantic?" | | |
| ▲ | macleginn 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | We expect different outputs in these two cases, though. A wrong word choice is usually accompanied by a hint that another word may have been intended, while a wrong spelling can be unambiguously marked as a mistake. These two behaviours can be turned on and off independently, and they need two different labels. | |
| ▲ | ealexhudson 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Agreed. "Dessert" vs "desert" - mistaking these two is often not a grammatical error (they're both nouns), but is a spelling error (they have quite different meanings, and the person who wrote the word simply spelled it wrongly). | | |
| ▲ | macleginn 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I agree, but this is definitely the kind of spelling error (along with complementary/complimentary, discrete/discreet, etc.) that we normally don't expect our spellcheckers to catch. |
|
|
|
