HACKER Q&A
📣 bjourne

Any spell-checkers that are good?


Given the vast strides made in language modeling in the past years, why are spell-checkers still so bad? Linux spell-checkers are based on dictionary lookups and Levenshtein distance and are terrible. E.g., they think "Levenshtein" and "lookups" in the previous sentence is spelling errors when it isn't. And detecting the grammatical errors in the previous sentence is too difficult for them. The year is 2024, why can't any spell-checkers figure out that "Were where you last night?" is incorrect?