|
|
Sentry Spelling Checker Engine - Support |
|
Home |
You are here: Home > Support > Sentry Spelling Checker Engine > Problems with locating suggestions
Product: Sentry Spelling Checker Engine (all SDKs)
Version: Any
Problems:
No suggestions are are given by the SSCE_Suggest function or
displayed in the spelling dialog when a misspelled word is detected.
A number of factors affect the success of Sentry's suggestion feature, and it can be difficult to determine in advance what conditions are most likely to yield success. Some of the factors that influence the suggestion feature are listed below.
Suggestion depth: The suggestion depth is an integer value ranging from 0 to 100. The value determines the tradeoff between time to locate suggestions and the quality of the suggestions produced. A value of 100 produces the best (most accurate) suggestions but takes the most time. Unfortunately, the factors listed below affect the depth needed to locate the best suggestion. For some misspellings, the correct suggestion will be located at depth 10 and for others depth 100 is needed. The spelling dialog box in the Sentry Windows DLL uses an interesting approach to deal with this. Initially, the suggestion list in the spelling dialog box is populated using the depth indicated by the MinSuggestDepth property, which is typically fairly low (e.g., 30). This produces suggestions quickly, and, in many cases, produces the correct suggestion. The spelling dialog box contains a "Suggest" button. When this button is pressed, the suggestion depth value is increased by 10, and a new set of suggestions is obtained. The user can repeatedly press the Suggest button to obtain suggestions at increasingly higher depths (until the maximum depth, 100, is reached, at which point the Suggest button is disabled).
Word length: Locating suggestions is pattern matching. Short words have less information available to ensure a successful match. Furthermore, the small number of letters means less letter diversity, which essentially means that short words tend to look more alike than do longer words, decreasing the probability that the correct match can be made.
Number of errors: The more incorrect letters a word has, the less it looks like the correct word and the more it may look like other words.
Position of errors: When errors occur near the beginning of a word, a higher suggestion depth may be needed to locate the correct spelling.
Similarity to other words: Words that have letters in common with many other words may result in so many suggestions of equal apparent value that the correct spelling is discarded. This can happen because the Sentry engine locates the best set of suggestions. The size of the set is determined by the calling application. For example, if the set can hold 16 words, but 17 words are found that make equally good replacements for the misspelled word, it's possible that the word left out will be the correct word.
Algorithm: The phonetic suggestion algorithm may have a better chance of finding the correct spelling for badly misspelled words (e.g., where half of the letters are incorrect) than the typographical algorithm. However, the phonetic algorithm is sometimes confused by certain combinations of letters. The typographical algorithm works very well with words that contain only one or two errors. Better results may be achieved by using both the phonetic and typographical algorithms (though the time required to locate suggestions will double). If neither suggestion algorithm is selected, then no suggestions will be produced. (Some versions of the Sentry Windows SDK (4.21 and some earlier versions) do not set either the Typographical or Phonetic suggestions options. The solution is to explicitely enable Typographical Suggestions, either by setting it in the INI file or the registry, or by calling SSCE_SetOption (be sure to use the sid returned by SSCE_GetSid).)
Copyright © 2015 Wintertree Software Inc.
