Build a better spell checker, win $10,000

<p><pre><code> However, by submitting your entry, you: are granting us an irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide right and license </code></pre> I'll stop reading there. I can't honestly believe that competent programmers would be willing to work for free for one of the worlds largest multi-national software corporations, with the chance of being paid a relatively small amount.

$10K? That probably wouldn't pay for a single programmer's efforts to do this...essentially you'll be working for Microsoft for free.<p>Hell Microsoft, at least do like Netflix and make the prize something worth pursuing.

I always find it a bit disingenuous when I see this kind of competition. I quickly went through the official rules [1] and they're unclear about the true motivations behind this offer. Sure, you get $10k if you develop a great spell checking algorithm, and Microsoft claims no ownership over your implementation. But then there's two clauses that I feel weird about:<p>* "are granting us an irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide right and license to: (i) use, review, assess, test and otherwise analyze your entry and all its content in connection with this Contest; and (ii) feature your entry and all content in connection with the marketing, sale, or promotion of this Contest (including but not limited to internal and external sales meetings, conference presentations, tradeshows, and screen shots of the Contest entry in press releases) in all media (now known or later developed)"<p>* "understand and acknowledge that the Promotion Parties may have developed or commissioned materials similar or identical to your submission and you waive any claims you may have resulting from any similarities to your entry"<p>I'll admit that this kind of contest pokes my CS brain and that other people will be at least curious enough about it to participate. But then you're getting $10k whereas Microsoft would be getting a bunch more out of your work. Am I wrong? Possibly. But my eyebrow moved when I read these pages.<p>[1] <a href="http://web-ngram.research.microsoft.com/spellerchallenge/Docs/SpellerChallengeOfficialRules.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://web-ngram.research.microsoft.com/spellerchallenge/Doc...</a>

<i>The Expected F1 (EF1) is the harmonic mean of expected Precision and Recall.[..] the Expected Percision is defined as...</i> (Rules page)<p>Could at least have run the Spell Check Challenge pages through a spell check!

 understand that we cannot control the incoming information you will disclose to our representatives in the course of entering, or what our representatives will remember about your entry. You also understand that we will not restrict work assignments of representatives who have had access to your entry. By entering this Contest, you agree that use of information in our representatives’ unaided memories in the development or deployment of our products or services does not create liability for us under this agreement or copyright or trade secret law;<p>Come on... What a fucked up plan is this? Let someone work for free, then let you whole engineering team "review" this... so ooops sorry if we remembered your algorithm. We didn't claim we wont.<p>I can't believe anyone will be willing to participate in this. This is a day time robbery.

I did a proof of concept for a better spell checker about 3 years ago. Query groups of two to three words in a search engine and look at the word count. Then replace the word in question with other words that are similarly spelled and run a query with each. The word with the highest result count is extremely likely to be the correct word. Really, it's surprising how accurate it is.<p>The glory of this is that it works with proper nouns that don't occur in dictionaries (IE: xkcd). In Google's initial demo for Wave, they showed "Icland is an icland" be corrected to "Iceland is an island." I'm fairly confident they took a similar approach. There's also a good chance it could work for other languages, because it doesn't use anything specific to English.<p>The disappointing part is that most of the accomplishment comes in "Suggestion Intelligence First," meaning that from a list of 5, the top result is the correct result. In most cases, the Suggestion Intelligence is just fine, you will just need to pick the right one yourself.<p>If anyone's interested, this was my presentation: <a href="http://soe.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/gset/Presentation08-Hungarian.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://soe.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/gset/Presentation...</a><p>And this was the "research paper." Unfortunately it was a three week program, and myself and the other coder (IE: the ones who understood how the thing worked) didn't contribute much to the paper. Feel free to ask if you have any questions. The email in there isn't actually my email: <a href="http://soe.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/gset/Paper08-Hungarian.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://soe.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/gset/Paper08-Hung...</a>

&#62; Q. Who is not eligible to compete in the challenge?<p>&#62; Entrants who are younger than 18 years of age;<p>Ugh. They just ruled out a large portion of the hackers for whom 10k is a lot of money.

<a href="http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html" rel="nofollow">http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html</a><p>10K please.

I'll pay more with far less onerous terms. <i>Seriously.</i> I'll happily sponsor grammar aid work too. Get in touch: <a href="http://gruschow.org" rel="nofollow">http://gruschow.org</a>

I should note that I work for Microsoft, but not for Microsoft Research, and of course, I don't speak for them.

Probably this has already been thought about but it seems to me that a good checker should look for typos arising from the proximity of certain letters on the QWERTY keyboard.<p>Particularly potential typos which would be correct spellings of different, unintended words (these pass undetected by existing checkers).

Does this mean IE will finally get a built-in spell checker?

Try another 3 zeroes.