Sometimes I'll type soesn't instead of doesn't, or jnowledge instead of knowledge. It happens.

A spell-checker which eliminated standard qwerty keyboard letter-adjacent flubs would be good.

When you look at the letters surrounding the letter 'D' on a keyboard and flub the word 'doesn't' none of the adjacent letters make sense.
soesn't
woesn't, (dibs on coining that one though)
eoesn't
roesn't
foesn't
coesn't
xoesn't

You'd think that these mistakes would auto-correct.

Sorry if this already exists.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Aug 27 2013

Autocorrect Aware Keyboard Layout Depends on the fact that modern spell checkers /do/ correct this sort of error [ytk, Aug 27 2013]

This already exists in every spellcheck application. Quite basic to the concept, in fact.

The examples given will auto-correct on my iOS device (except for "coesn't").
-- tatterdemalion, Aug 27 2013


Well mine soesn't. It just underscores the word, but that gives me an idea...
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Aug 27 2013


There are a few different ways of measuring the "distance" between one word, and another - common ones include the Hamming distance which is probably the most basic, and the Levenshtein Distance takes it a stage further. I don't know what the name is of the thing you're talking about, which might be like a weighted Levenshtein, where edits are weighted according to the physical keyboard-distance between keys, but there are people out there in google-land who are talking about exactly this.

I'm interested in somehow codifying any string into a single numeric (or if that's not feasable, perhaps a geometric coordinate tuple) that provides an absolute measure, when compared against another value of the similarity or distance of one word to another. Say it was in 3 dimensions, then "cat" might be at location (x,y,z : 135.11, 34.12, 890.94), and "orangutan" at (x,y,z : 11.12, 104.55, 860.76) with a distance of 145.7557 between them - it's unlikely that someone writing one of those words, actually meant the other.

Initially, this might be based on a Levenshtein kind of metric, perhaps augmented by keyboard difference (though you'd need to factor in the various differences between international keyboards) but later, bring synonyms into play, and ultimately to start using alternative language definitions as well.

Before you know it - you've got a geometric semantic map of the whole of language that could be used for spell-correction, search-engine optimisation and translation - I rather suspect that there are various implementations of such a geometric semantic space floating out there looking at the interwarbs as we speak.
-- Zeuxis, Aug 27 2013


Spell checkers nowadays will correct for this sort of error. The iPhone and OS X both have this sort of correction built in, and I can only presume that other systems have it as well. Those systems fail though when the mistyped word is also a real word. The linked idea is my proposal to solve this problem.
-- ytk, Aug 27 2013



random, halfbakery