How to Write a Spelling Corrector

Previous discussions:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42587" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42587</a><p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=327897" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=327897</a><p>Many great thoughts and comments already posted, so it's worth reading the thoguhts of HN contributors as well as this classic from Norvig.

Norvig expanded on this theme in a chapter in <a href="http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596157111/" rel="nofollow">http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596157111/</a> (not yet out) -- the draft I read applied the Google n-gram corpus to word segmentation, decryption, and a faster spelling corrector. Lovely and instructive code, as always.

In case you do<p>- not have the luxury to have such a large ecological footprint (taking into account all the externalities too)<p>- are not always connected and<p>- are not granted access to the full UN corpus etc.<p>then you can still do quite good, cheaper and smarter.<p><a href="http://hunspell.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://hunspell.sourceforge.net/</a><p>Hunspell is the default spell checker of OpenOffice.org and Mozilla Firefox 3 &#38; Thunderbird. Gőg hasn't beaten that yet.

Interesting: a Java implementation of this algorithm is 372 lines, while a Clojure one is 18!