jaap@chromo.ucsc.edu (Jacob Wilbrink) (05/12/89)
I've been wondering what the program "spell" does, since it seems to make very many errors. Some examples of words it thinks are spelled correctly are utomsrr mgdesou aneorxx How does "spell" ever derive those words by adding inflections, prefixes and suffixes to words in the dictionary? Please e-mail responses to jaap%chromo@ucscc.ucsc.edu or cmph000@ucscj.ucsc.edu. Thanks.
irf@kuling.UUCP (Bo Thide') (05/13/89)
In article <7084@saturn.ucsc.edu> jaap@chromo.UUCP (Jacob Wilbrink) writes: >I've been wondering what the program "spell" does, since it >seems to make very many errors. Some examples of words it thinks >are spelled correctly are > >utomsrr >mgdesou >aneorxx All these words are caught as misspelled by the HP-UX version of spell(1). ^ Bo Thide'-------------------------------------------------------------- | | Swedish Institute of Space Physics, S-755 91 Uppsala, Sweden |I| [In Swedish: Institutet f|r RymdFysik, Uppsalaavdelningen (IRFU)] |R| Phone: (+46) 18-403000. Telex: 76036 (IRFUPP S). Fax: (+46) 18-403100 /|F|\ INTERNET: bt@irfu.se UUCP: ...!uunet!sunic!irfu!bt ~~U~~ -----------------------------------------------------------------sm5dfw
rowland@hpavla.HP.COM (Fred Rowland) (05/17/89)
I tried those three "words", in sentences just in case there was something funny about the isolated text, and spell caught them all. I'm using HP's HP-UX too. Fred Rowland Avondale Division
decot@hpisod2.HP.COM (Dave Decot) (05/17/89)
>I've been wondering what the program "spell" does, since it >seems to make very many errors. Some examples of words it thinks >are spelled correctly are > >utomsrr >mgdesou >aneorxx What drug were you on when you put these "misspellings" in your document? :-) Actually, most implementations of spell(1) use a hashed dictionary of correct words. These words apparently happened to hash to the same place as real words. Dave Decot
cowan@marob.MASA.COM (John Cowan) (05/18/89)
In article <1007@kuling.UUCP> irf@kuling.UUCP (Bo Thide') writes: >In article <7084@saturn.ucsc.edu> jaap@chromo.UUCP (Jacob Wilbrink) writes: >>I've been wondering what the program "spell" does, since it >>seems to make very many errors. Some examples of words it thinks >>are spelled correctly are >> >>utomsrr >>mgdesou >>aneorxx > >All these words are caught as misspelled by the HP-UX version of spell(1). > My version of 'spell' catches them also. However, in defense of the program, it is not designed to be 100% reliable. 'Spell' uses a hashing scheme. Each word is stripped of prefixes and suffixes, and the resulting base form is hashed and looked up in a bit table. If the bit is 0, the word is certainly misspelled; if the bit is 1, the word is assumed correct. There are 30,000 1-bits in a 10^27 bit table, so the probability of false positives is about 1/4000. According to Doug McIlroy, the author of 'spell', a typical document contains 20 misspelled words or less. Therefore, about 1% of documents contain a misspelled word that is not reported. Source: Jon Bentley, >Programming Pearls<, ISBN 0-201-10331-1.
kucharsk@uts.amdahl.com (William Kucharski) (05/18/89)
Spell(1) in Amdahl's UTS 2.0 catches the three words as well.
--
William Kucharski
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