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"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 cou
by thinkingemote 1y 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 1y agoA 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 1y agoOk, 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?"
- ealexhudson 1y agoAgreed. "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 1y agoI 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.
- macleginn 1y agoWe 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.
- tacitusarc 1y agoI don’t think I agree with your interpretation of the definition. If I spell the word “pale” as “pal”, that is not an acceptable spelling for the word “pale”, even if it is coincidentally the acceptable spelling for an entirely different word. If I asked a human editor to spellcheck the sentence: “His mouth dropped and he turned pal.”, the editor would correctly indicate I had misspelled the word. Spellcheck hasn’t done this in the past because it can be quite difficult. But that’s a limitation of computer capability, not functionality bounded by the definition of the term “spellcheck”.