Exploiting structure of a keyboard...

Can we use the structure of a keyboard to improve spelling correction? Where will it work and where will it fail? The thought of exploiting the structure of a keyboard is very simple and intuitive. If you abstract it at a higher level then it boils down to - Just as you exploit the structure and syntax in language to enhance semantics, why not exploit the structure and syntax of a keyboard to enhance semantics. Also the vocabulary (or structure/syntax) of the keyboard is universal. I am not sure how keyboards in other languages are; but as we are dealing with English, I think the "universality" assumption is fair enough.

Actually taking this at one more level of abstraction, what we are actually trying to do is exploiting structure/syntax in the medium (device) that is used in communication of typed text. So the syntax will change if we used a cellphone keypad to send SMS or if we used a telephone with a rotating number dial (like how we used to have old phones in india) to type in a phone number. So, the rules or language (device) of communication might change but the underlying principle is still the same!

Just a thought - How about recommending (suggesting) a correct phone number given the history of user’s calls as well as the size and structure of the phone keypad! – we’ll probably have fewer wrong numbers :). To this we can add information related to the particular cell phone plan. People tend to make long distance calls when weekend and night minutes are free as opposed to using day time minutes, but you would not care if you had more day times as opposed to a cheaper plan which gives you fewer minutes!.

hmmm... sounds interesting to me... any takers?

Have you met excellence?

I was out having dinner with two of my professors and another friend of mine. While talking about various topics like music, art, marriage, history etc. one of my professors asked a very interesting question :- "Have you met excellence?".... He took turns to ask us individually... of course I dint have an answer then.... but the question stuck in my mind and raised a series of questions like "What is excellence?", "How do I formally define excellence?", "Are there any fixed set of parameters that define excellence?", "How will I know if something or someone is excellent?", "How do I differentiate between various levels as excellent/verry verry good/very good/good etc."... or as my friend put it - "I dont have a frame of reference to compare"...

But as I lay in my bed thinking about it, I had some kind of an answer to it... I went to him the next day and told him that my answer to his question would be - "As I grow and meet different people in my life, and encounter different experiences, my definition of excellence changes and there are different people at different points of time whom I find excellent!"...

We then had a very interesting discussion about how time is a very important factor... there always seems to be a right time/timing for everything... It was very nice to listen to his thoughts and ideas and I am always amazed to see how passionately he talks about his own advisor and the kind of ideas his advisor had... He then thanked me for sharing with him my thoughts and we parted - with me reinforcing the notion - "Time plays a very important and key/crucial role in life".