[Athen] Contextual Spelling of Word 2007

Robert Iakobashvili coroberti at gmail.com
Thu Aug 21 12:26:36 PDT 2008


Hello,

Since several people have expressed their interest
in this topic, thus, the info comes.

MS-Word 2007 for Windows and MS-Word 2008 for Macintosh so-called
"contextual spelling" was introduced with a great enthusiasm as expressed e.g.
here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/correcteurorthographiqueoffice/archive/2006/06/05/617653.aspx

Office 2007 for Windows (2008 for Mac) automatically activates
"contextual spelling", if a computer has at least 1 GB of memory,
otherwise, you can configure it manually as below:
http://beyondteck.blogspot.com/2006/06/enable-contextual-spelling-in.html

You may teach your students to pay attention to the words underlined
by a blue line, which Office-2007 is suspecting to be out-of-context / misused /
confused, whereas the right click mouse menu contains some correction
candidates.

Spelling capabilities of about all of the existing spellers, tools,
word-processors, etc have been studied by Dr. Pedler in the link below
and the citations inside,
and found to be not of a much assistance for people with dyslexia:
http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/research/recentphds/pedler.pdf

Since the research of Dr. Pedler does not cover MS-Word-2007 with contextual
spelling capabilities, we made a small comparison testing among
Word-2003, Word-2007 and Ghotit web-site speller. Still, this is not a
comprehensive
research using a big corpus.

You can find some results attached as a Word-2003 document attached.

Some brief conclusions are that Word-2007 is better than Word-2003 due
to contextual spelling, where there is still remains a large room for
improvements.


Truly,
Robert Iakobashvili, Ph.D.
......................................................................
www.ghotit.com
Assistive technology that understands you
......................................................................
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