Re: Stubbornly ignoring misspellings

aalaan wrote:
Thanks for such a quick reply. I didn't realise you actually worked at Microsoft. I wouldn't dare to suggest messing with your lexicon. I think it's up to the user to create exclusion dictionaries as required, and they were the entries I found necessary.

However, I definitely have issues with the spell and grammar checking in other areas, which range from plain wrong to misleading, but as they are on Word 2000 I wouldn't trouble you with them. Wonderful program by the way.

Friday arvo here in Australia so I'm 'excited' about 'exiting' to a glass of cool beverage. No more editing today! Almost as Boozy as Paris was...
Thanks again.
"Thierry Fontenelle [MSFT]" <ThierryFontenelleMSFT@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:8452780A-3B59-4027-BDEC-4B0D745C7594@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Thanks for the suggestion, Aalaan. It's always a trade-off, of course.
Deciding to include a word or not is never an easy task (if we were to remove
"noël" from the French lexicon, I'm pretty sure we'd also get messages from
users who would wonder why we don't recognize it in lower case "since all
standard dictionaries include it". Your mention of "exited", etc is
interesting. We can only hope that this problem will be less serious in the
future now that we are introducing a contextual speller in Office 2007. So if
you write something like "I'm exited about this", we now squiggle "exited"
and suggest "excited", even though "exited" is still in the lexicon of the
traditional spell-checker and is correct in other contexts.

See http://blogs.msdn.com/naturallanguage/archive/2006/06/19/637359.aspx or
http://blogs.msdn.com/correcteurorthographiqueoffice/archive/2006/06/05/617653.aspx for more information about this new feature...

Thierry

Thierry Fontenelle [MSFT]
Microsoft Natural Language Group


"aalaan" wrote:

Well explained. I would just say that I would put both versions in an
exclusion file. It's better to be challenged at either occurrence, and then
'ignore', than to let a wrong one through. I have done this with 'abut' and
'exited' and 'excited' as well as 'dinning' which is a very rare word
meaning to make a din, whereas it is much lore likely you will mistype
'dining'! N'est pas?

"Thierry Fontenelle [MSFT]"
<ThierryFontenelleMSFT@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:3525C6A6-E573-49A2-90F0-29B1DD26B891@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi John,

The problem is that "noël" is also a valid common noun in French. It can
refer to a song sung around Christmas time, or to a gift (the Petit Robert
gives this example, for instance: "donner aux enfants leurs petits
noëls").
This explains why "noël" in lower case is in the speller lexicon. So you
are
not replacing an error by another error, in fact. There is simply a
coincidence between two words, one which, in a given sense, should always
be
capitalized, and another, common noun that is not capitalized. It's not
different from the pair pierre (=stone)-Pierre (first name). You could
have
the same in English if you wrote "James bond" where "bond" would not be
squiggled by the regular spell-checker because the word also exists in
English as a regular noun.

This being said, I agree with you that Noel without the accent is not a
very
frequent first name in French and it would probably be better to only
include
the upper-case with the diacritic. We'll definitely think about this for
the
next version.

Thanks for your feedback,

Thierry

Thierry Fontenelle [MSFT]
Microsoft Natural Language Group




"John Doue" wrote:

John Doue wrote:
Hi,

Although I have very carefully followed the very clear instructions
from
the MVP site http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/ExcludeWordFromDic.htm,
I cannot get Word 03 to recognize as spelling errors, for instance,
Noel
in French (which should spell Noël).

I have made sure the exception file is in plain text, one word
misspelled per line and that it is saved under the name MSSP3FR.EXC in
the same directory as my custom.dic file.

I have further made sure I have only one custom.dic file on my disk and
that this file, of course, does not contain the mispelled words. I have
also made sure the custom.dic file is correctly checked as the custom
dictionary.

What next can I do? Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Regards
Sorry for answering my own post but I found a way around the problem by
creating a subdirectory to \proof and moving the custom.dic and
mssp3fr.exc there. For some reason, this works BUT I realize I have a
secondary problem: since words must be written in lower case letters,
the dictionary now does flag the error but proposes only "noël" in lower
case, which in fact would replace a spelling error by another error.

Is there anyway to solve this?

Best regards.

--
John Doue





Aalan and Thierry, thanks about these commments, I had not realized that "noël" was acceptable in a certain meaning in French. My client did not take it this way and might lack sense of humor. He must be using a different speller than MS Word's since he detected the lack of "ë" in Noël, a mistake which had survived several layers of checking. As far as Aalan suggestion is concerned, AFAIK, it is not possible to include any capital case spelling in the exclusion file. This is very clearly spelled out (pun intended) in the exclusing instructions.

And yes, Thierry, it would be nice if MS would look into such cases but however good the spell-checking will be, it will not detect a mistake I caught at the very last minute in a document I was about to email to the same client. Since I know Thierry's French is excellent (of course), here it is (was):

"Ce trimestre, la croissance devrait être triée par ..." How could possibly Word detect I intended to type "tirée" ... Fortunately, I caught it in time ... Life is tough!

Regards

--
John Doue
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Stubbornly ignoring misspellings
    ... Thanks for the suggestion, Aalaan. ... standard dictionaries include it". ... The problem is that "noël" is also a valid common noun in French. ...
    (microsoft.public.word.spelling.grammar)
  • Re: Spell Catcher [was spelling checker]
    ... Greek -izein: to employ -ise is to flout etymology and logic. ... Where there are, in dictionaries, the alternatives -ise and -ize ... Fowler's Modern English Usage tells us: ... was a Latin or French or English imitation, ...
    (uk.comp.sys.mac)
  • French-Chinese-English Electronic Talking Dictionary Translator FCE3810
    ... traditional Chinese, ... When the foreigners choose the interfaces of French or English, ... 3.Magnanimous and professional complete collection of dictionaries ... brief classified vocabularies. ...
    (sci.electronics.basics)
  • Re: Spell Catcher [was spelling checker]
    ... British English dictionary denying that organization is correct ... Greek -izein: to employ -ise is to flout etymology and logic. ... Where there are, in dictionaries, the alternatives -ise and -ize ... was a Latin or French or English imitation, ...
    (uk.comp.sys.mac)
  • Re: Canadian Dictionary
    ... The problem with a Canadian Dictionary is That the country is almost equally divided between using the King's English (British English) and French Canadian which is not exactly quite like European French. ... Sadly, due to a bug, Exclusion Dictionaries do not work in Office 2004/2008 ...
    (microsoft.public.mac.office.word)
Loading