pazzani%AEROSPACE@sri-unix.UUCP (06/27/84)
From: Michael Pazzani <pazzani@AEROSPACE> Ignoring philosophical issues (after all, this is AILIST not a bad remake of "My Dinner With Andre") I don't feel that the spelling correctors or the geography test correctors are really that intelligent. The geography corrector seems to be very similar to the programs which grade SAT tests. Surely, one wouldn't want to call a SAT test correcting program AI even though it does a better and faster job than I would. I think its more important to discuss how to make these programs smarter. What would it take to have a spelling corrector find the intended word instead of all of the possibilities? A while ago, I worked on a program to do word sense selection. I wrote a spelling corrector for that program which treated a misspelled word as new word whose senses were the senses of all the possible corrections. It worked well when things like part of speech or selectional restrictions could disambiguate. How could one make this program smarter? Is it possible to try the "closer" possibilities first? Can you propagate the part of speech or semantic constraints into the search for possibilities? How would one store a large dictionary so it is efficient to find nouns, which are vehicles which look like "planh"? How can you detect a spelling error if the mistake is another word? (e.g. "I just typed rm *. Can you restore my flies from backup tape?) How do people do this anyway?