Проверка орфографии: история и развитие программных средств

Software to help correct spelling errorsIn software, a spell checker (or spelling checker or spell check) is a software feature that checks for misspellings in a text. Spell checking features are often embedded in software or services, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary, or search engine.

In 1961, Les Earnest, who headed the research on this budding technology, saw it necessary to include the first spell checker that accessed a list of 10,000 acceptable words. Ralph Gorin, a graduate student under Earnest at the time, created the first true spelling checker program written as an applications program (rather than research) for general English text: SPELL for the DEC PDP 10 at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, in February 1971. Gorin wrote SPELL in assembly language, for faster action; he made the first spelling corrector by searching the word list for plausible correct spellings that differ by a single letter or adjacent letter transpositions and presenting them to the user. Gorin made SPELL publicly accessible, as was done with most SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) programs, and it soon spread around the world via the new ARPAnet, about ten years before personal computers came into general use. SPELL, its algorithms and data structures inspired the Unix ispell program. The first spell checkers were widely available on mainframe computers in the late 1970s. A group of six linguists from Georgetown University developed the first spell check system for the IBM corporation. Henry Kučera invented one for the VAX machines of Digital Equipment Corp in 1981.

The International Ispell program commonly used in Unix is based on R. E. Gorin's SPELL. It was converted to C by Pace Willisson at MIT. The GNU project has its spell checker GNU Aspell. Aspell's main improvement is that it can more accurately suggest correct alternatives for misspelled English words. Due to the inability of traditional spell checkers to check words in complex inflected languages, Hungarian László Németh developed Hunspell, a spell checker that supports agglutinative languages and complex compound words. Hunspell also uses Unicode in its dictionaries. Hunspell replaced the previous MySpell in OpenOffice. org in version 2.0.2. Enchant is another general spell checker, derived from AbiWord. Its goal is to combine programs supporting different languages such as Aspell, Hunspell, Nuspell, Hspell (Hebrew), Voikko (Finnish), Zemberek (Turkish) and AppleSpell under one interface.