The following presents the summary of a comparison made between Microsoft Office 2007, Google Wave and Ghotit's context-sensitive spell checkers. The text selected for the comparison was taken from published text written by people with dyslexia.

1. Contextual Spell Checkers Effectiveness for People with DyslexiaGoogle Wave, Microsoft Office and Ghotit Comparison

2. Background Information on Context Sensitive Spell Checkers

3. What is a contextual spell checker? A Contextual Spell Checker analyzes the context of sentence in which the misspelled word appears, and based on the context of the word suggests the corrections. A Context Spell Checker implements Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms.

4. What is required for an effective context spell checker? Advanced NLP algorithms that analyze correctly the context of a sentence and the incorrect word written in it An optimized scoring system that place in the correct order the relevance of the suggested corrections High performance system that can run in the background multiple iterations and select the most highly scored ones within mili-seconds A learning NLP server whose intelligence increases as more examples and data is gathered Self learning algorithms that take into each next iteration additional information provided by the user

5. Special requirements of spell checkers by people with dyslexia (#1) Correction of severely misspelled words Regular spell checkers address mild spelling mistakes only Detection of misused/out-of-context words (e.g. “meat” instead of “meet”) Regular spell spellcheckers can not identify misused words as they have no notion of the sentence context Detection of grammar mistakes within a sentence of severely misspelled words Regular spell checkers offer some grammar correction, but only if the words comprising the grammatical error are spelled correctly

6. Special requirements of spell checkers by people with dyslexia (#2) Assistance in selecting the correct suggested word People with dyslexia have difficulty in selecting the correct suggested word as they do not recognize the meaning of the suggested words based only on its spelling Making sure that the sentence that was written and corrected is what was intended to be written Assistance is required to provide confidence to the dyslexic writer, that what is written is what he intended to write

7. Leading context-sensitive spell checkers Microsoft Office 2007 Spell Checker Context-sensitive spell checking was incorporated into Microsoft Office 2007 Google Wave Spell Checker With the release of Google Wave, Google introduced into the Wave collaboration platform a context spell checker Target audience of Google Wave and Microsoft Office 2007 Spell Checkers Mainstream writers, with mild spelling / typing errors

8. Ghotit context-sensitive spell checker The Ghotit context-sensitive spell checkers was designed and built directly to meet dyslexics unique spell checking requirements The Ghotit context-sensitive spell checker has offered in the past two years a free online service http://www.ghotit.com/free_service.shtml After two years of testing and UI design, Ghotit has recently released its Microsoft Word Plugin http://www.ghotit.com/products.shtml

9. Comparison of Context Sensitive Spell Checkers Effectiveness to People with Dyslexia

10. Dyslexic Text Sources The text selected for testing was taken from published text written by people with dyslexia: Ph.D. theses of Dr. JenifferPedler http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/research/recentphds/pedler.pdf Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spell_checker A paragraph from ICTSAN educational blog http://ictsan.edublogs.org/sample-texts-for-spellchecking/

11. Some example from the tests “Its plane fore al too sea.”(*) Text Source: http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/research/recentphds/pedler.pdf

12. Some example from the tests “Its latter prefect awl the weigh.”(*) Text Source: http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/research/recentphds/pedler.pdf

13. Some example from the tests “Their coming too sea if its reel.”(*) Text Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spell_checker

14. Dyslexic Text - Correction Comparison Summary Table(*) (*) For more details of this test please contact Ghotit

15. Ghotit Special Spell Checking Designed for People with Dyslexia

17. Contextual spell checker

18. Severe spelling error correction

19. Misused word correction

20. Grammar checker

21. Split-words merging/ merged-words splitting

22. Integrated text-to-speech

23. Integrated dictionary

24. Personal dictionary

25. Inline editing