[WEB4LIB] Re: A lesson to be learnt from the britannica site?

[Bob Rasmussen]

On Wed, 24 Nov 1999, Hanan Cohen wrote:

> Hanan Cohen wrote:
> 
> This thread developed into (almost exlusivly) a domain name discussion.
> What I was thinking is that our readers and computer sometimes find it
> hard to find online information because of bad spelling.
> 
> If someone comes to you and asks for information about a plant with a
> Latin name, it is sometimes impossible to find it if you don't know the
> correct spelling.
> 
> I wander if we have ways to help people find information using "sound
> alike" tools or other means that I don't know of.
> 
> Is there a "dictionary" of all possible spellings to any word in a
> language?

It sounds like what you're looking for is a "soundex" system. As I understand
it, these were developed by the phone companies quite some time ago to aid in
looking up people's names. Each name is indexed using a particular phonetic
alphabet. To search for a name, it was first reduced to that same phonetic
alphabet, and a search was made. Since the alphabet removed ambiguities such
as between "c" and "s" (at least in English), and double letter, you ended up
getting what you wanted a high percentage of the time.

I do not know whether anyone has applied this technology to either catalog
searching or web searching. One intriguing possibility would be to use
technology on a PC to "spell-check" an entry (at least for words other than
proper names), and then forward the corrected data to the host. 

For that matter, I can envision the day where a PC would have voice
recognition, with the results being fed to the host. I understand the state of
the art is quite good for single-speaker, trained systems, and quite a lot of
work is being done on general-speaker systems.

-- 
Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

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