14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is ready to offer no less than $30,000 in prizes to researchers and students that help the company build a better spellchecker in relation to its search / decision engine. Bing and Microsoft Research have joined forces and introduced the Speller Challenge, a competition set up to ultimately enhance the quality of the spell check experience users get when entering a query into Bing.
The software giant’s own decision engine, just as other search engines, is designed to take advantage of algorithms that approximate the results users are actually looking for, basing the decision on its ability to identify specific typos in queries.
“This technique, called Spelling alteration, is the predominant way for search engines to translate typing errors, alternative spellings, and synonyms with the goal of providing the best results to you on the first try,” revealed a member of the Bing team.
“However, this approach is not perfect. My spelling error could be your perfect query. The Speller Challenge is looking for a better way to determine which results a search engine should provide and how alternatives should be represented.”
Although already announced, the Speller Challenge is not yet live. According to the Redmond company, registration is scheduled to open on January 17th 2011.
The contest is open to students and researchers, but essentially to all people even if not necessarily affiliated with an academic or industrial lab, save for those in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, or Syria.
Participants have until May 27th 2011 to enter the Speller Challenge, with the software giant planning to announce the winners on June 17th.
“The goal of the Speller Challenge (the “Challenge”) is to build the best speller that proposes the most plausible spelling alternatives for each search query. Spellers are encouraged to take advantage of cloud computing and must be submitted to the Challenge in the form of REST-based Web Services,” Microsoft stated.
There will be no less than five winners dividing the $30,000 as such: 1st place: $10,000, 2nd place: $8,000, 3rd place: $6,000, 4th place: $4,000 and 5th place: $2,000.