Slashdot Mirror
Automatic Spelling Corrections On Github
An anonymous reader writes "Github projects may be seeing a different kind of contributor than normal: a small bot is now crawling through projects, contributing spelling corrections. It builds on top of the github API and existing documentation style-checking code. Future directions for the project look beyond spelling mistakes and at automated bug fixing on a large scale."
I wonder if this bot will do as well as every HR department out there posting "pearl" and "unique admin" positions
Eventually someone will contribute SW that will guess the contributors by their distinctive patterns of spelling mistakes. I hope it will be able to find them in the archives. I won't be surprised to read on Slashdot some copyright lawsuit that depends on both apps, perhaps on opposing sides of the claim.
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make install -not war
I'm willing to say that this idea is totally rediculous even!
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
According to the article, it just submits a pull request. This isn't some bot running on Google's own servers making changes without permission. So if anyone has a problem with it, or if it submits poor changes, they can simply ignore it.
Exactly, we've all see how well it works on Wikipedia..
Worse, we've seen what it does to texting.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Err, I meant to type Github, not Google. *headdesk*
But at least it's just sticking to READMEs.
Don't worry, some bot will fix that.
Mostly random stuff.
Wikipedia has similar bots and has been using them for a long time. For example there's Bibcode Bot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bibcode_Bot which cleans up citations. That bot is smart enough that it can even extract bibliographic information from a linked website and put it into the citation. The bots used do occasionally go awry but by and large end up saving a lot of time. Of course, Wikipedia has the advantage that one isn't modifying code so if a bot screws up a page will just look a little wonky. They'll need to be careful with this. But it looks like for now it is restricted to readme files and requires approval of the changes by the user, which should help prevent things from going too drastically wrong.
Clbuttic overaction, in my opinion. This buttbuttination of our writing by computers is out of hand. I don't know if my consbreastution can take it...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Don't confuse what a spell checker does when auto-correcting with what something like T9 or smart phone predictive text does. The latter is the cause of the cell phone headaches.
While a spellchecker will check a string of characters against a dictionary and attempt to correct misspellings (like "misspell" with only 1 s or 1 l), predictive text auto-correct is both more clever and more stupid.
Predictive text makes certain assumptions about the keyboard arrangement and tries to fit typos to possible words that could have been intended had the user not been smashing 3 tiny buttons at once on a cell phone or screen keyboard. While a spellchecker would recognize "danm" as a typo for "damn" with just transposed letters, it would never try to correct it to "calm" on the basis that the letter c is close to the letter d and n and m are nearby or some nonsense as that.
A plain old spellchecker, like the one under discussion here, makes no attempt to guess what word was meant and assume a typo is a result of accidentally pressing keys near the intended ones. It just looks at what words could have been intended based on close matches with the dictionary.
By the way, auto-correct will frequently fail to guess a replacement when the misspelling involves letters that are not nearby on the keyboard.
This particular bot just looks at readme files. It could(and might) start looking at comments, but even if it does, it will probably work a lot like the spell correction in most IDEs(Eclipse for example) and simply check the spelling in comments. Most of these code spell checkers also have enough smarts to understand the common auto-gen doc formats(doxygen, javadoc etc) and will ignore any identifiers(variables, classes etc) in the comments.
Monstar L
What is needed just as much as a spell checker is a grammar checker.
Yes! I occasionally need to proofread OCR'd text that has been generated into an HTML file. I've written some code that extracts the text and flags misspellings. That catches a lot of things for me. But, it still misses many errors that a grammar checker *would* find.
Back in the late 80's or early 90's, I purchased an add-on for Microsoft Word 5.0 called something like Grammatik IV. It did a wonderful job of finding and flagging possible errors for review. Now this is back in the days of DOS! Basic operation was to load a file into Word, activate the grammar checker, and it would step you through each possible error, giving you an opportunity to accept the recommended change, ignore the error, or let you make an ad hoc correction. Then it would step on to the next error.
my google-fu must be slipping as I've been unable to find anything comparable. I thought LibreOffice might help, as it has a grammar checker, but it only seems to be available whe entering new text. Can't seem to find a way to tell it to just start checking from the current point, and proceed onward.
What grammar checking tools have you found useful? (Currently using an old Win/XP SP3 system.)
P.S. Typed on my mobile phone, so I apologize in advance for any typos.
Excuse me, it's "capisce".
In my experience, "freedom of language" almost always means "ignorance of language" and is akin to "keeping it real".
The handful of people whose grasp of language is so good that they can purposely misspell or use poor grammar for effect will almost certainly not be hindered by anything "github" does, unless this new spellchecker is going to be clumsily used on code and the hilarity that ensues breaks software that said linguistic maestro uses. See what I just did there? I purposely used clumsy sentence structure because I'm Just. That. Good.
Capisce?
You are welcome on my lawn.
More annoying would be if it runs around autocorrecting spelling of documents written in a language it doesn't understand. Or worse, if it tries to mangle everything into that hideous American patois by removing the letter "U" from words like "colour".
Taylor Mali already showed us that spell-checking is not safe.
The the impotence of proofreading
By Taylor Mali
www.taylormali.com
Has this ever happened to you?
You work very horde on a paper for English clash
And then get a very glow raid (like a D or even a D=)
and all because you are the words liverwurst spoiler.
Proofreading your peppers is a matter of the the utmost impotence.
This is a problem that affects manly, manly students.
I myself was such a bed spiller once upon a term
that my English teacher in my sophomoric year,
Mrs. Myth, said I would never get into a good colleague.
And thats all I wanted, just to get into a good colleague.
Not just anal community colleague,
because I wouldnt be happy at anal community colleague.
I needed a place that would offer me intellectual simulation,
I really need to be challenged, challenged menstrually.
I know this makes me sound like a stereo,
but I really wanted to go to an ivory legal colleague.
So I needed to improvement
or gone would be my dream of going to Harvard, Jail, or Prison
(in Prison, New Jersey).
So I got myself a spell checker
and figured I was on Sleazy Street.
But there are several missed aches
that a spell chukker cant cant catch catch.
For instant, if you accidentally leave a word
your spell exchequer wont put it in you.
And God for billing purposes only
you should have serial problems with Tori Spelling
your spell Chekhov might replace a word
with one you had absolutely no detention of using.
Because what do you want it to douch?
It only does what you tell it to douche.
Youre the one with your hand on the mouth going clit, clit, clit.
It just goes to show you how embargo
one careless clit of the mouth can be.
Which reminds me of this one time during my Junior Mint.
The teacher read my entire paper on A Sale of Two Titties
out loud to all of my assmates.
Im not joking, Im totally cereal.
It was the most humidifying experience of my life,
being laughed at pubically.
So do yourself a flavor and follow these two Pisces of advice:
One: There is no prostitute for careful editing.
And three: When it comes to proofreading,
the red penis your friend.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
We're just sticking to the original Latin, rather than that hideous Anglo-Norman patois.