23 Nov
2017
23 Nov
'17
9:11 a.m.
On Nov 22, 2017, at 5:05 PM, Doug McIlroy
<doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
The first one was a fantastic tour de force by Bob Morris,
called "typo". Aside from the file "eign" of the very most common
English words, it had no vocabulary. Instead it evaluated the
likelihood that any particular word came from a source with the
same letter-trigram frequencies as the document as a whole. The
words were then printed in increasing order of likelihood. Typos
tended to come early in the list.
This was written up in the same BSTJ number that talked about many of the troff
pre-processors and other DWB tools, IIRC. Was that the "big" UNIX edition?
Either way, the paper is well worth a read if you can find it (and I'm sorry I
can't recall the title right now).