1199708 - auto correct should not correct anything with a capital letter

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::Keyboard, defect)

Description

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Mobile; rv:43.0) Gecko/43.0 Firefox/43.0

It is never correct when autocorrecting acronyms or proper nouns.

Comment 1

[Tim Guan-tin Chien [:timdream] (please needinfo)]

Do UX agree?

Comment 2

[Tiffanie Shakespeare [:tif]]

From UX triage:

We agree that the word list doesn't make the best suggestions. NI djf as he is on the other bugs - do you have an update on making the quality of the list better, specifically making jam higher on the list ;)

Thanks for pinging the UX team!

Comment 3

[David Flanagan [:djf]]

I think the AOSP wordlists that we use are probably as good as we're going to get. The jam/ham thing is an upstream bug that we could fix in our local copy. But that is a different bug.

I agree that if the user types more than one capital letter, we should probably not autocorrect.

I'm less certain about a single capital letter. Dietrich asserts "it is never correct" in that case. Obviously that is an exageration. If I type "Parid", or "Paros", it will autocorrect to "Paris".  Also, there is the complication that since we automatically capitalize the first word in a sentence, we can't use an initial capital letter, by itself, as an indicator that a word is a proper noun.

There may well be a case for not autocorrecting as aggressively if the user has explicitly pressed the shift key, but I'm not convinced that turning autocorrect off entirely is the right thing to do.  Though it appears that iOS does just turn off autocorrect when the user presses the shift key (but not for auto capitalization at the start of a sentence).

Dietrich: can you give examples of what kind of troubles this bug has caused you? (I just tried typing your last name to see if it incorrectly auto-corrected to some other word. But I accidentally typed Ayaka, and it correctly autocorrected it to Ayala. So my anecdotal evidence (n=1) says that the behavior is good as it is :-)  Do you feel that we could split the difference and autocorrect for really common proper nouns like (from the wordlist) "American", "British" and "John"?

Comment 4

[Dietrich Ayala (:dietrich)]

(In reply to David Flanagan [:djf] from comment #3)
> I think the AOSP wordlists that we use are probably as good as we're going
> to get. The jam/ham thing is an upstream bug that we could fix in our local
> copy. But that is a different bug.
> 
> I agree that if the user types more than one capital letter, we should
> probably not autocorrect.
> 
> I'm less certain about a single capital letter. Dietrich asserts "it is
> never correct" in that case. Obviously that is an exageration.

Guilty as charged :) But the sentiment is based on daily usage and the silent rage brimming over ;)

> Also, there is the
> complication that since we automatically capitalize the first word in a
> sentence, we can't use an initial capital letter, by itself, as an indicator
> that a word is a proper noun.

Yes, this is an obvious case of an initial capital letter being ok to autocorrect since there's no probability difference of the word being a proper noun or not.

We should be able to detect first word in a sentence, right?

> There may well be a case for not autocorrecting as aggressively if the user
> has explicitly pressed the shift key, but I'm not convinced that turning
> autocorrect off entirely is the right thing to do.  Though it appears that
> iOS does just turn off autocorrect when the user presses the shift key (but
> not for auto capitalization at the start of a sentence).

The iOS behavior causes me zero rage WRT to proper nouns.

> Dietrich: can you give examples of what kind of troubles this bug has caused
> you? (I just tried typing your last name to see if it incorrectly
> auto-corrected to some other word. But I accidentally typed Ayaka, and it
> correctly autocorrected it to Ayala. So my anecdotal evidence (n=1) says
> that the behavior is good as it is :-)  Do you feel that we could split the
> difference and autocorrect for really common proper nouns like (from the
> wordlist) "American", "British" and "John"?

I will try to record actual instances of suggested (see below) words from now on. IIRC, the common problem is when the proper noun is not in the dictionary, and the auto-correction is WAY off.

I cannot give *autocorrect* exact steps because I had to turn it off. Also, I'm not daily driving Firefox OS as a *phone* device anymore, since we're not supporting it as a phone device anymore, so I'll likely see this less often.

Another thought - I've been assuming that suggestion results are related to autocorrection results. IOW, the first suggestion would be the same as the autocorrect candidate. Is that a false assumption on my part?

An other another thought - I also think all bets are off when the user inserts a capital letter mid-word. We should suggest, but not autocorrect, unless the confidence threshold is very high.

Comment 5

[BMO Automation]

Firefox OS is not being worked on