I have got a solution for this problem but It is greater than O(n^2). The idea is to take the edit distance with selected words from dictionary of all words in english and output the word with min edit distance (An edit distance is number of insertions, deletions and replacement operations needed to convert one word into another)
The edit distance is calculated via dynamic programming technique and complexity of calculating edit distance for one pair of words is O(n^2) Btw, in which company did they ask this question? On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 8:33 AM, lichenga2404 <lichenga2...@gmail.com> wrote: > The question in an interview. And I got lost with this one. > > Could you guys give some algorithm or idea on this ? > > > Write a program that reads a large list of English words (e.g. from / > usr/share/dict/words on a unix system) into memory, and then reads > words from stdin, and prints either the best spelling suggestion, or > "NO SUGGESTION" if no suggestion can be found. The program should > print ">" as a prompt before reading each word, and should loop until > killed. > > Your solution should be faster than O(n) > > For example: > > > sheeeeep > sheep > > peepple > people > > sheeple > NO SUGGESTION > The class of spelling mistakes to be corrected is as follows: > > Case (upper/lower) errors: "inSIDE" => "inside" > Repeated letters: "jjoobbb" => "job" > Incorrect vowels: "weke" => "wake" > Any combination of the above types of error in a single word should be > corrected (e.g. "CUNsperrICY" => "conspiracy"). > > If there are many possible corrections of an input word, your program > can choose one in any way you like. It just has to be an English word > that is a spelling correction of the input by the above rules. > > Final step: Write a second program that *generates* words with > spelling mistakes of the above form, starting with correctly spelled > English words. Pipe its output into the first program and verify that > there are no occurrences of "NO SUGGESTION" in the output > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Algorithm Geeks" group. > To post to this group, send email to algogeeks@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > algogeeks+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/algogeeks?hl=en. > > -- Umer -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Algorithm Geeks" group. To post to this group, send email to algogeeks@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to algogeeks+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/algogeeks?hl=en.
