Suggest me a program or way to handle the word correction / suggestion system. - Let's say the input is given as 'Suggset', it should suggest 'Suggest'.
Thanx in advance. And I'm using python and AJAX. Please don't suggest me any jquery modules cuz I need the algorithmic part.
It will take a lot of work to make one of those yourself. There is a really nice spell checker library written in python called PyEnchant that I've found to be quite nice. Here's an example from their website:
>>> import enchant
>>> d = enchant.Dict("en_US")
>>> d.check("Hello")
True
>>> d.check("Helo")
False
>>> d.suggest("Helo")
['He lo', 'He-lo', 'Hello', 'Helot', 'Help', 'Halo', 'Hell', 'Held', 'Helm', 'Hero', "He'll"]
>>>
Algorithm that solves your problem called "edit distance". Given the list of words in some language and mistyped/incomplete word you need to build a list of words from given dictionary closest to it. For example distance between "suggest" and "suggset" is equal to 2 - you need one deletion and one insertion. As an optimization you can assign different weights to each operation - for example you can say that substitution is cheaper than deletion and substitution between two letters that lie closer on keyboard (for example 'v' and 'b') is cheaper that between those that are far apart (for example 'q' and 'l').
First description of algorithm for spelling and correction appeared in 1964. In 1974 efficient algorithm based on dynamic programming appeared in paper called "String-to-string correction problem" by Robert A. Wagner and Michael J. Fischer. Any algorithms book have more or less detailed treatment of it.
For python there is library to do that: Levenshtein distance library Also check this earlier discussion on Stack Overflow
