I’m dyslexic, which means that my brain doesn’t function in a literary kind of way and instead functions in a very systematic way. The erratic nature of language doesn’t fit the total mental model and the lack of being able to spot errors and the frustration with knowing a word is spelt wrong from it’s appearance but not knowing quite why is the worst.
One of the common problems in Ubuntu is that the spellchecker is sub-optimal for all cases where I spell a word wrong. Often I have to copy and paste the word into google, because google does a much better job of correcting my spellings than ispell or firefox.
Annoyingly one of the common mistakes the spellchecker makes is assuming that because I’ve got a couple of extra letters in a word, that what I really mean is to add suffixes. So for instance misspelling alcohol suggested to me ‘alcoholic’ but not ‘alcohol’.
To aid this I wonder if it would be possible to use the full text indexing method of word stemming (removing the ends of a word) to see if it’s possible to get better suggestions. It’s more unlikely that a person has misspelled the suffix than the rest of the word, just as it’s less likely someone has misspelled the start constant of a word (but not vowels they’re treacherous).
I wonder what others methods could be used to improve spelling suggestions? perhaps some sort of web 2.0 social group think new age neural network pattern recognition software? Or we could just send the word to google automatically 