Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
> Bernhard Eversberg wrote:
>> Spell-checking can hardly be made quite as useful for
>> catalogs as it is being experienced with search engines.
>> It may even be counterproductive to employ spell-checking, with
>> no way for the user to figure out what's going on.
> I don't accept it as a given that spell-checking can't be made very
> useful for catalogs. Why do you believe this?
>
I said "...quite as useful". One reason is the mix of languages
in catalogs and the difficulty for software to detect the language of
titles (as opposed to full text), and the other thing is the
very paucity of text data we have in catalogs which makes it
hard to build a database of correct spellings and related incorrect
ones, to support a high enough degree of precision.
OTOH, the person searching is quite often interested to find an
exact spelling and not get silly suggestions. My main point was,
however, that we _can_ present all words (and thus, all spellings)
which actually _exist_ in the database, presenting a plain word
index with frequencies.
> You think Google's spell-check, optimized for their environment, just
> appeared out of the mind of Zeus?
Did I say so? They have a _much_ larger text base to draw from
for statistical evaluation, that's the difference.
B.Eversberg
Received on Tue Aug 07 2007 - 07:48:32 EDT