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This is a tumbling log of things and thoughts that pass my way.
If you got here by accident, you may want to visit my website instead.
"In the past week, two friends (Dean and Bill) independently told me they were amazed at how Google does spelling correction so well and quickly. Type in a search like [speling] and Google comes back in 0.1 seconds or so with Did you mean: spelling. What surprised me is that I thought Dean and Bill, being highly accomplished engineers and mathematicians, would have good intuitions about statistical language processing problems such as spelling correction. But they didn’t, and come to think of it, there’s no reason they should. I figured they and many others could benefit from an explanation, and so on the plane back from my trip I wrote a toy spelling corrector, which I now share."