Advanced Spell Checker For WordPress
After the Deadline is an advanced spell checker plugin for WordPress that was released on Monday. In addition to the standard spell check and suggestions features, it also includes style and grammar checking. The plugin also lets you define custom dictionary of sorts – you can set it to always ignore certain words. Here’s the plugin in action : 
What I found especially interesting is how AtD can detect misused words. For example, most spell checkers would blindly assume that the sentence “I don’t know if it’s wrong or rite” is correct because the word “rite” is in their dictionary. “After the Deadline” on the other hand uses contextual spell check and will flag “rite” as a mistake, suggesting you use “right” instead. Well, at least that’s the theory. I managed to get that particular example to work after a few tries, but apparently this feature still needs some work.
The plugin itself is actually a wrapper for the AfterTheDeadline.com API service. This means that like with Akismet, you will need to sign up for an account and get an API key before you can use the WP plugin. The service is free for casual users but large sites and prolific writers are encouraged to upgrade to a subscription-based service plan.
The only drawback is that AtD only supports English and the author isn’t planning to add other languages anytime soon. Nevertheless, the plugin will certainly be useful to the myriad English bloggers, and also to people who aren’t native English speakers yet still choose to write in the de-facto lingua franca.
Related posts :
Subscribe via RSS
Get Updates by Email
Thanks for the write up. Without any biasing I’m able to detect misused words with 90% accuracy. Unfortunately without any biasing I also flag correctly used words as misused. This especially becomes a problem because folks are more likely to use a word correctly than incorrectly.
So what I’ve one is identified words the statistical model doesn’t work well for (it’s/its, a/an, there/their, etc), moved them away from the misused word list, and created grammar rules for them.
This has given me some wiggle room to cut my biasing down. I’m aiming for a 0.0050 false positive rate–it’s at 0.0011 and 0.0029% in my tests now. Once I change this balance you’ll notice the misused word detection is more accurate.
What makes this problem challenging is for some words (depending on the context) either word could feasibly be correct. The solution is to look at more context but the more context I choose to use the more danger I have of data sparseness leading to more false positives and less coverage of how the words are actually used. It’s an interesting problem.
What is nice (from my perspective) is where one tool falls short, I have another tool I can use to make up the difference (such as the grammar checker).
Oops, this the perfectionist scientist in me who can’t edit comments: the numbers are 0.005 or 0.5%, 0.0011 or 0.11%, 0.0029 or 0.29%. I apologize for the confusion I may have caused leaving the errant % in there.
[…] On 1 Jun 09, I launched After the Deadline. The first review of After the Deadline (AtD) came from w-shadow.com. There were also discussions on CMSReport.com and Hacker […]
[…] Use the advanced spellchecker—this feature is one of the greatest things to ever happen to me as a writer—I’m not exaggerating! The WordPress.com advanced spelling and grammar checker is a God-sent. Even though Microsoft Word’s standard spellchecker is a good thing to have, aren’t you sometimes frustrated when it doesn’t pick up a usage mistake (like “their,” “they’re” or “there”) just because the word is technically spelled correctly? WordPress’s spellchecker can pick up on this type of usage error. You can also customize its options to check for biased language, clichés, complex phrases, diacritical marks, double negatives, hidden verbs, jargon, passive voice, and redundant phrases. . […]
[…] Use the advanced spellchecker—This feature is one of the greatest things to ever happen to me as a writer—I’m not exaggerating! The WordPress.com advanced spelling and grammar checker is a God-sent. Even though Microsoft Word’s standard spellchecker is a good thing to have, aren’t you sometimes frustrated when it doesn’t pick up a usage mistake (like “their,” “they’re” or “there”) just because the word is technically spelled correctly? WordPress’s spellchecker can pick up on this type of usage error. You can also customize its options to check for biased language, clichés, complex phrases, diacritical marks, double negatives, hidden verbs, jargon, passive voice and redundant phrases. […]
[…] Use the advanced spellchecker—this feature is one of the greatest things to ever happen to me as a writer—I’m not exaggerating! The WordPress.com advanced spelling and grammar checker is a God-sent. Even though Microsoft Word’s standard spellchecker is a good thing to have, aren’t you sometimes frustrated when it doesn’t pick up a usage mistake (like “their,” “they’re” or “there”) just because the word is technically spelled correctly? WordPress’s spellchecker can pick up on this type of usage error. You can also customize its options to check for biased language, clichés, complex phrases, diacritical marks, double negatives, hidden verbs, jargon, passive voice, and redundant phrases. […]
[…] Use the advanced spellchecker—this feature is one of the greatest things to ever happen to me as a writer—I’m not exaggerating! The WordPress.com advanced spelling and grammar checker is a God-sent. Even though Microsoft Word’s standard spellchecker is a good thing to have, aren’t you sometimes frustrated when it doesn’t pick up a usage mistake (like “their,” “they’re” or “there”) just because the word is technically spelled correctly? WordPress’s spellchecker can pick up on this type of usage error. You can also customize its options to check for biased language, clichés, complex phrases, diacritical marks, double negatives, hidden verbs, jargon, passive voice, and redundant phrases. . […]