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[personal profile] jack
Would it be worth having an "unlikely" mark for a spelling checker? For those occasions when it's entirely possible you did mean "licens (n, ceremonial greek fireplace)"[1], but it's overwhelmingly more likely you meant the common word "license"?

It would have to be visually represented as not requiring you to get rid of it, but merely to draw your attention to it, if that's possible. On the other hand, you could argue that's what spelling checkers ought to do anyway, although they are not normally treated like that. At least, "not in dictionary" is a clear judgement, even if the writing is correct (grammar "checkers" results really are all "suggested").

Come to think of it, maybe there's an uncomfortable parallel with compiler warnings?

[1] Warning, not an actual definition.
[2] I think perhaps the "one-liner" tag, as misleading as it has become, represents the nearest I ever come to a single contained thought, rather than a fifteen interrelated ones.

Date: 2008-10-16 11:41 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] rochvelleth.livejournal.com
Are there spell checkers that build up a profile of the user so they can make judgements about what that particular user tends to a) use most and b) confuse most, IYSWIM? There should be :)

The biggest problem is when you type one word but meant another where both possibilities are pretty much equally likely (e.g. 'kind' and 'king' - I think I'm incapable of typing 'kind regards' without messing it up) - I think that's more common for me that typing a very uncommon word when I was intending to type a perfectly common one.

Date: 2008-10-16 11:46 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com
There probably are, but most of the time it's probably unfortunately impractical -- people move between computers and programs enough, and have sufficiently little time for configuring settings, that something that works out of the box most of the time for most people is more often useful than something that's better. (And it always ends up containing weird idiosyncrasies; there's something to be said for consistent behaviour.)

I think I'm incapable of typing 'kind regards' without messing it up

If one had the oomph to investigate it, the checker could -- and probably does -- base the decision on nearby words. Although that would have to be a "maybe", since it's always possible you did mean "king regards" as part of a longer sentence :)

Date: 2008-10-16 03:05 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] hilarityallen.livejournal.com
Well, it could be a sensible add-on for a user that regularly writes lots at the same machine (e.g. a writer or a thesis-writer).

Date: 2008-10-16 11:56 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] robhu.livejournal.com
I have a weakly typed language, so I only discover things are mispelld when people point it out to me at run time.

Date: 2008-10-16 12:02 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] woodpijn.livejournal.com
MS Word are putting something like this in the latest version. They will underline words in blue if they are uncommon words which are often typoed for more common words, like "manger" for "manager". I can't remember whether they're also putting in heuristics to guess actual likelihood, like removing the blue line from "manger" if it's preceded by "away in a".

Date: 2008-10-16 12:07 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com
Ah! "Manger" was the very example I'd heard, so obviously I'd heard some fallout from that, without hearing it specifically. That is interesting. Although I've always had a problem with office spell checkers, that the red line seems so intrusive that you can't ignore it, I always end up having to disable check-as-you-type or to specifically add/ignore the word.

Date: 2008-10-16 12:10 pm (UTC)
emperor: (Default)
From: [personal profile] emperor
"Where's the secretary gone?"
"Oh, she's away in a manager"

Date: 2008-10-16 12:12 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com
LOL; also bogglement due to potential mental reversal of sexistly predicted gender roles :)

Date: 2008-10-16 01:00 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] geekette8.livejournal.com
I think:

"Where's the secretary gone?"
"Oh, he's away in a manager"

would have been better! :-)

Date: 2008-10-16 05:48 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] yrieithydd.livejournal.com
Indeed. My mum and a friend were amused by a typo in the hymn that goes to the Londonderry Air which resulted in 'Bethlem's Manager'.

Date: 2008-10-16 12:12 pm (UTC)
ext_8103: (Default)
From: [identity profile] ewx.livejournal.com
To do it well you could give the low-likelihood words an associated cohort of words that make them more likely, so you didn't get lots of false positives when actually writing about greek fireplaces. (Obviously with a good grammar checker or software understanding of the text you could do better still, supposing those things to be actually possible...)

Date: 2008-10-16 12:15 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com
Indeed.

Although even if not you could have the option to move the words to the main dictionary (or equivalent), which wouldn't be worse than a spell checker which left them out completely would be.

I'm sure big-name spell-checkers do have context-dependent things (or even just different custom dictionaries for different users), so you can have a "writing fantasy fic" dictionary and a "writing cv dictionary".

Date: 2008-10-16 12:12 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] filecoreinuse.livejournal.com
vim already has something like this. Is you switch spell check on, as you type words are either left un-highlighted or highlighted with one of four configurable colours/styles. From the manual:
	SpellBad	word not recognized			|hl-SpellBad|
	SpellCap	word not capitalised			|hl-SpellCap|
	SpellRare	rare word				|hl-SpellRare|
	SpellLocal	wrong spelling for selected region	|hl-SpellLocal|
Very useful :)

Date: 2008-10-16 12:16 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com
Ah, of course :) Sometimes the problem is not "why doesn't foo exist" but "why isn't ffoo conveniently available to me" :)

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