Friday, June 20, 2008

Google speller needs a grammar lesson?


Google is amazing. Among other things, their speller does a great job. Which is why it was shocking to me that the other day, when I was comparing Google and Powerset, I found an obvious error.

My query "who did leonard marry in yeomen of the guard" got the speller to suggest "who did leonard married in yeomen of the guard". Even a third-grader knows that that is wrong. While plain old n-gram may not fix that (bi-grams almost certainly cannot), the resulting document count may help: the original query had 92100 results, and the suggestion only 9640.

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