Anti-Autocorrect
By Dr. Yamok - Published 2020-05-06
Autocorrect: the worst enemy of typers. One moment you are making a sentence with flowing structure and impeccable grammar and you look back and… it’s a mess. Autocorrect ruined it. But this is the nature of autocorrect: an artificially intelligent system to systematically choose the worst words for you to type. The goal of this research is to remedy this problem by replacing the common autocorrect with a superior version that does not ruin your wordsmithing: Anti-Autocorrect.
Anti-Autocorrect is a system designed by HuntPost funded research to bring about a new age of autocorrect. The Anti-Autocorrect aims to do the exact opposite of the Autocorrect algorithm.
Autocorrect was designed to make spelling and grammar easier. However, evidence says to the contrary. Time and Time again, internet perusers and avid texters come across too many-a horrendous sight to see, destroying relationships, causing heartbreak, starting nuclear wars, and restaurants putting pickles on your burger when you clearly specified that it would be in their best interests to expunge the pickle.
Anti-Autocorrect aims to take the Autocorrect algorithm and do the exact polar opposite. Common spell-checking algorithm Levenshtein distance is often leveraged to determine what a word was probably supposed to be, but it fails spectacularly 110% of the time. Anti-Autocorrect takes this and finds the word that is the absolute furthest from what you typed.
For example, if I type “Payroll”, the new and improved Anti-Autocorrect will change this to “Xanthoderm”.
Autocorrect also fails at context. Through, Though, Tough, Thorough, and others, are commonly miscorrected by Autocorrect. Anti-Autocorrect solves this issue by taking the position of each letter of every possible correction and averages the letter positions together. For example, If I type “Though”, Anti-Autocorrect will average the possibilities and spit out “tjqomlgh”.
Anti-Autocorrect can also fix what you said to what you probably meant. If you send a message saying “Happy Birthday”, Anti-Autocorrect will look at it and determine what you probably meant to say, which in this case would be “I’m defunding your entire branch, so join me for milk and cookies”.
People who have installed Anti-Autocorrect on their phone have already sent in astounding reviews. One said “adfga fapijgtr ivvnf payroll janew gonprreh 0/5”. Another said “I love Anti-Autocorrect! It should be installed on every phone! Anti-Autocorrect did not send this message”. The highest praise we got was from the government, who said it was a brilliant way to keep whistleblowers from contacting the press.
All in all, Anti-Autocorrect is a way to undo the sins of Autocorrect and bring about a new age of spelling and grammar.
