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AI Bug Open Source Software

Automatic Spelling Corrections On Github 105

Posted by timothy from the wye-wood-enny-wan-wan-thatte? dept.
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."
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Automatic Spelling Corrections On Github More

Automatic Spelling Corrections On Github

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  • #!/user/bin/pearl (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28, 2011 @06:28PM (#37237220)

    I wonder if this bot will do as well as every HR department out there posting "pearl" and "unique admin" positions

  • Erasing Fingerprints (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Sunday August 28, 2011 @06:30PM (#37237238) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • But I spel gud...

  • What Could Possibly Go Wrong (Score:3)

    by Sarusa ( 104047 ) on Sunday August 28, 2011 @06:46PM (#37237356)

    But at least it's just sticking to READMEs.

  • Wikipedia has similar bots (Score:5, Informative)

    by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 ) on Sunday August 28, 2011 @07:10PM (#37237500) Homepage
    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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
    • It looks to me like its only doing the documentation (README) docs so changing code isn't a problem, but is a logical next version.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mwvdlee ( 775178 )

        My README's on github usually includes some example code. Wonder if it'll be able to detect that.

  • Oppressive autocorrection. (Score:5, Funny)

    by TWX ( 665546 ) on Sunday August 28, 2011 @07:13PM (#37237520)

    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...

  • spellcheck != predictive text (Score:5, Informative)

    by cratermoon ( 765155 ) on Sunday August 28, 2011 @07:20PM (#37237552) Homepage

    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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      That's a shame; so it won't know to change "spell checker" to the correct form, "spelling checker"?

      A "spell checker" would be a program that ensures that a witch's spells are valid.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shimbo ( 100005 )

      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..

      Actually, no. It's not using either a plain spellchecker, or predictive text. It's just using a small fixed list [github.com] of common errors.

      • Thanks for the link. While it's true it's not a true full-featured spellchecker, it does have a list of just over 500 common misspellings and their correct equivalents, so I'd argue it *is* a primitive spellchecker.

        In any case, it's definitely NOT a predictive text auto-correction tool, and there's no danger of the results showing up on DYAC [damnyouautocorrect.com].

  • I honestly wouldn't expect a lot of developers to cupertino with this decision.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Slur ( 61510 )

      I honestly wouldn't expect a lot of developers to cooperate with this decision.

      There, reverted that Mac-bot correction for you.

  • I hope it's optional, because some of us write British English rather than American English. This tool won't do us much good if it starts correcting project names, for instance. 3rd party KDE developers would be even worse off ;)

  • Not that anyone cares, but here is a real life example of auto-spelling where it is not wanted:

    Manager comes across a previously unseen (misspelled) error message in a database field. Database is accessed by several applications.
    Manager copies and pastes error-message into email and sends it to colleague. Email client auto-corrects misspelled error message.
    Colleague does a grep using the full spelling corrected error message text, can't find any occurrence of it in his code, and points finger at my code.
    Gre

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Thing 1 ( 178996 )
      I think there's a part missing in your sequence, because email clients do not auto-correct a message by themselves. Either the manager re-typed instead of pasted; or, the manager accepted corrections on a portion of text that should not have had corrections accepted on it. The computer did not make the mistake -- although it can be said that it contributed to it, in part.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ghmh ( 73679 )

        It gets complicated, doesn't it? Did the 'typewriter' make a mistake in the movie Brazil [youtube.com]?

  • What is needed just as much as a spell checker is a grammar checker. Seems like younger people today simply can't figure out the difference between: Their, There, and They're.

    http://www.wikihow.com/Use-There,-Their-and-They're [wikihow.com]

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by martyb ( 196687 )

      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 pos

      • I don't see the sarcasm tags in there.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tgv ( 254536 )

        I worked on spelling and grammar checking, and I can assure you it's far from easy. The errors most grammar checkers can find reliably will not interfere with general understanding. Other errors are very hard to reliably detect and correct; illiterate language is almost impossible to correct.

        E.g., let's take an example from that page (whose link has mysteriously disappeared when I clicked on Reply): "There is an antique store on Camden Avenue." Suppose I made a mistake and wrote: "*Their is an antique store

        • That's not how you do it. Levenshtein distance is one of the fundamental functions in text analysis, but it is not the end of it! One approach to detect the grammar mistake in the above sentence is to use markov chains and analyse the probability of a word following another. It is extremely uncommon for the word "is" to follow the word "their" in correctly written English (check with google if you like). But "is" is very likely to follow the word "is" hence "their is" is very likely a grammatical error.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tgv ( 254536 )

            Markov models have the same problem as any other metric: they don't take context into account. And that includes competence and performance of the author: a French coder will make different mistakes than an English theatre journalist, and there are no corpora on which to train the model. There's no money for that. This is just going to be another cheap hack with very little benefit and potentially huge costs.

      • We used to use Grammatik that was a stand-alone Unix package and then later integrated into Unix WordPerfect. It was a bit annoying at times (PASSIVE VOICE! PASSIVE VOICE!) but helpful.

        Since our move to OpenOffice for Linux, many years ago, it is something we sorely miss. So I can understand your frustration. The grammar addon for OpenOffice is incomplete and slow. I don't have any recommendations, unfortunately.

      • What grammar checking tools have you found useful? (Currently using an old Win/XP SP3 system.)

        I recall that there was a special checker in Google Wave that took into account the context of surrounding words when suggesting replacements. For example, if you typed "I have bean to the shops", while "bean" (the food) is spelt correctly, it is the wrong word in this context, and "been" would be suggested instead. Unfortunatly Google Wave was discontinued, so I don't know if this functionality is avaliable anywhere.

    • That link is going on every email I send from this day forth. Or maybe every fourth email I send from this day.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mwvdlee ( 775178 )

      Don't complain about grammer if you can't properly: punctuate.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      does there need to be a difference between spelling those on paper as there's no difference in vocalizing them in your head? if they sound the same in your head, what does it matter how it's written as long as its use is obvious from the other words around it? maybe it would be better to replace those with "ther". the meaning depends on the context anyhow. nowadays you have to be able to read and understand many dialects, not just your local colour.

      you see, the current correct spelling was just pulled out

  • I was watching a show on SkyTV about IBM's Watson Supercomputer competing in Jeopardy. Perhaps GITGUB could rent time off IBM's Watson to redirect that AI from Jeopardy and recognising and learning from correct human answers to recognising errors and the human contributed corrections and then learning from this and correcting other code that contains the same or similar errors?

    Who knows we might finally get rid of those annoying memory leaks in just about every piece of software I had the pleasure of using

  • The CunningLinguist project got a little more than they bargained for.

  • README (Score:2)

    by hey ( 83763 )

    What if the README is like this:
    This program is a spell checker. It will find mistakes like recieve and conveneince

  • It had better not change everything to the incorrect, US way of spelling.

  • From the code, it looks like you use a dictionary containing spelling errors. Is there a good reason why a large dictionary and Levenshtein distance wasn't used instead? I think this might be a good idea. You can also put a smaller penalty on characters close to each other on the keyboard and easily confused characters, than other characters.

    Best regards,
    Bernard Hoffman IV,
    Computer store salesman, and proud beach house owner.

  • Taylor Mali already showed us... (Score:3)

    by znerk ( 1162519 ) on Monday August 29, 2011 @04:43AM (#37239612)

    Taylor Mali already showed us that spell-checking is not safe. [youtube.com]

    The the impotence of proofreading
    By Taylor Mali
    www.taylormali.com [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.

  • Automated correction of spelling without human plausibility checking is already a serious risk. Automated "correction" of coding errors is a disaster waiting to happen. There are far too many things that seem to be an error but may be in fact critical. Case in point: Reading uninitialized memory. Usually that is an error. But when gathering entropy it is not. The Debian OpenSSL disaster was caused by this type of correction, suggested by Valgrind. Although there was a human without understanding of the code

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by blueg3 ( 192743 )

      Reading uninitialized memory when gathering entropy is harmless and potentially beneficial, but can't properly be considered not-an-error. More to the point, your entropy-gathering system should be no worse for the wear if you *don't* read the uninitialized memory, since on many systems, uninitialized memory could have zero entropy (thus, you can't rely on it as a source of entropy).

      The problem is that a person broke the code while in the process of fixing the Valgrind warning -- not that fixing the warning

  • I have to say I think this is a bad idea, but I also want to add that it's something no one asked for or wanted...a pointless feature that will probably cause more harm than good. I expect more out of the Github crew.

  • I find it increasingly frustrating that many applications default to US English, despite the locale of my machine or IP address I'm coming from.

    And thus find it increasingly frustrating when it tells me words ending in -our are spelled wrong and wants to correct them, or words ending in -ise.

    So what will this bot do? Would I expect to see, over and over again, that it's submitting what I would consider incorrect submissions because, like so many things, because it knows only about American English (and to

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by blueg3 ( 192743 )

      Well, IP addresses don't exactly have a language associated with them. Hell, it's been hard enough to try and get the IETF to add a "language" field to TCP packets.

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