Summary Details
| Query: |
Autocorrect function in word processing software
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| Author: | Kari Kraus | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Computational Linguistics
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| Summary: |
Dear list: Last spring, I sent the following inquiry to Linguist: >I'm looking for information (articles, white papers) on the >autocorrect >technology built into most word processing software (e.g., Microsoft >Word). >I want to understand (in broad terms) the software engineering side of >things (how does the technology work?), but just as importantly, the >theoretical side (e.g., classification of errors [haplography, >dittography, >metathesis, etc.] according to current thinking on the physiological >mechanisms involved in copying/transcribing/typing (perhaps this sort >of R&D >falls within the purview of visual word recognition?). I received two off-list replies, one from Mike Maxwell, the other from Robert Dale. Robert Dale provided a bibliographic starting point: > There's a paper by the Word Grammar Checker team (principally George > Heidorn) in R Dale, H Moisl and H Somers (eds.) [2000], Handbook of Natural > Language Processing. Marcel Dekker. I believe that's the most detailed > exposition around. > > I don't know of any material on aspects of text correction in Word other > than the grammar checker -- the spelling checker, autocorrects etc are quite > separate. > Mike Maxwell initally wrote to say that the replace-text-as-you-type feature in Word relies on a hand-built correction list, which one can consult by selecting "Autocorrect" from the "Tools" pull-down menu: >My understanding of Autocorrect, is that all there is to it is a list >of >"from" and "to" spellings: misspellings and corrections, or >abbreviations >and their translations ("(c)" gets changed to the copyright symbol). >So >when you type a space or punctuation, there is presumably an action >that >Word performs in the background: it selects the preceding word (as >delimited >by whitespace and/or punctuation), and looks on the "from" field of >the >records in its correction list. (You'll notice that list is >alphabetized, >so lookup is fast.) If Word finds a match, it substitutes the "to" >field >from that same record. I think it's also smart enough to copy the >capitalization from your word into the substituted word. He later wrote back to partially amend that statement: >It seems to >have at least the ability to automatically correct metathesized >letters and >certain omitted letters. I say that because I've seen it fix words >that I'm >sure it doesn't have in its correction list (particularly linguistic >terms: >I just watched it correct 'alolmorph' and 'alomorph' to 'allomorph'). >Presumably it's using its spell checker for a list of correct words, >together with some notion of common errors. For example, it corrects >'alomorph' but not 'alloorph', so it seems to know that writing a >single 'l' >for a double 'll' is a common mistake, while omitting an 'm' is not. >In sum, it's smarter than I thought. My thanks to Robert Dale and Mike Maxwell for their helpful responses. I'd be interested in any additional information others could provide. Sincerely, Kari Kraus University of Rochester kkru@mail.rochester.edu |
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| LL Issue: | 12.2078 | |
| Date Posted: | 21-Aug-2001 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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