Minh Nguyen <mxn(a)zoomtown.com> wrote:
Useful for
checking if a word exists (i.e. spell check).
But spell check presents suggestions for correcting your spelling.
Advanced spell check does, certainly. Not the kind you'd find in simple
applications, where 'spell check' just highlights the words not in the
dictionary--my IM client has this kind of spell check. And the more
advanced, the better the suggestions--primitive will go by degree-of-difference,
more advanced will check transpositions and nearby letter keys, better will
compare against the sounds the letters are trying to represent, and common
misspellings. Just because it's not top-of-the-line doesn't mean it's
nonexistent.
You'd need some serious AI to *write* original
definitions for tens of
thousands of words, and I'm not confident that a community of 500-some
can pull off such a huge feat without some outside help (a free-content
dictionary, for instance).
It'd be silly to expect a bot to compose the entries. But as you say, there's
nothing to prevent the information from being imported, if free ones can be found.
If they can bot enough to create so many blank templates, they can bot enough to
fill them in.
*Muke!
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