JamSpell VS goSpellcheck

There is, for example, a curious evaluation table provided by a modern ML-based spellchecker JamSpell. According to it, JamSpell is awesome—while Hunspell is a mere 0.03% better than dummy ("fix nothing") spellchecker... Which doesn't ring true, somehow!

That's a huge topic, which I am planning to cover towards the end of the article series please like and subscribe, but in short: yes, my opinion is that spellchecking is actually a "machine learning problem in disguise", and most of existing dictionaries are more a roundabout way of storing something-not-unlike-models than analytical data.

But ML approach will raise a question of data availability. What good your "deep learning OSS spellchecker" will do if there aren't good (and open) models for it which cover as much languages as existing Hunspell dictionaries do? And what if adding a bunch of new words requires laborous model retraining? It is not unsolvable, but non-trivial.

I believe all the giants have something like this inside (I don't think spelling correction in Google search bar is handled with Hunspell, right?), but it is much harder to do as an open tool, ready to embedding into other software.

There are a notable attempts, though: JamSpell for one (https://github.com/bakwc/JamSpell), which has an open "free" models, and more precise commercial ones; source code is open (maybe also only for using "simplistic" models, haven't dug deeper).

Obviously, there are open-source spellcheckers other than Hunspell. GNU aspell (that at one point was superseded by Hunspell, but still holds its ground in English suggestion quality), to name one of the older ones; but also there are novel approaches, like SymSpell, claiming to be "1 million times faster" or ML-based JamSpell, claiming to be much more accurate.

Great tool, it was my first contact with spellchecks. Back that I was working for a company that does translations powered by machine learning. Back then I was a student and as the article mentioned I was one of the naive ones to think that a spellcheck is an easy thing to build.

https://github.com/victorqribeiro/goSpellcheck

I wrote this originally in python, then I ported it to go. Back then I had plans to improve it. I believe that the most erros would be due to miss press of keys. I was sketching an algorithm to find similar words given a dictionary. Soon I had to deal with other projects (from college) and I let the spellcheck to the smart people.