abstract
| - In today's school and business environments, the most common means of communication is reading and writing. People that don’t master those communication methods are usually left behind. According to several estimations 5-17% [ Refer the sources] the population suffers from dyslexia, a neurological problem that affects those peoples’ ability to write and read freely [Refer something]. The common number one writing assistive technology, the standard spellchecker, is not effective for people with dyslexia and people that use English as their second language. This failure is due to two structural limitations of all spellcheckers: a. The fact that a spelled word needs to be very, very close to the target word in order to get corrected spelling b. The fact that the text is checked word by word, disregarding any contextual considerations From a technical perspective, most of the spellcheckers use a very limited editing distance, which is defined as the number of operations required to transform one word into another. For example, the words ‘happy’ and ‘hapy’ have an editing distance of 1 (one missing letter) and will, therefore be attuned successfully, but the words "happy" and "apy" have an editing distance of 2 and therefore will not be treated successfully. In addition, standard spellcheckers will regard the sentence “I will be happy to meat you at 8 o'clock” as a legitimate expression, disregarding the intention of the writer, which is “I will be happy to meet you at 8 o'clock. The word “meat” will not appear as a misspelled word since it is found in the dictionary. Ghotit was founded by Ofer Chermesh, a lifelong dyslectic and entrepreneur who for years had envisioned in his mind the exact assistive technology solution that would address his writing and reading hardships; and by his friends who are math and computing experts that undertook the challenge of translating Ofer’s dream into a reality. Ghotit web site launched February 2008 after more than a year of research and development. Current testing of a corpus of dyslectic English demonstrated 90% correction success for Ghotit . This is in comparison to academic research reports that state that the best spell checkers success rate is under 40% (e.g. a recent Ph.D. study .
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