Apple Knows You Didn't Mean to Type 'Ducking'

"Ducking" had become such a recognizable error caused by the iPhone's autocorrect function that The Wall Street Journal conducted an interview with the feature's creator, Ken Kocienda, at a duck farm. That system drew upon both a "static dictionary" of common words and proper nouns as well as a "dynamic dictionary" of words that each user typed often, Mr. Kocienda said. But it also did not correct close misspellings of curse words, he said, with the goal of preventing users from accidentally inserting vulgarity into their messages. The update will allow iMessage corrections to better consider a word's context in a sentence, said Yulan He, a professor of natural language processing at King's College London whose given name is usually changed by iMessage to "Tulane." Previously, autocorrect matched the spelling of each word, in isolation, against the words in its dictionaries. "Now, when they replace a word, they would ensure the replaced word will still maintain the original meaning of the sentence," Professor He said.