Earlier this year I gave a talk about my research at Oxford’s All Souls College, and worked with a chef to design an accompanying menu.
Thinking about my work in southwest Western Australia, I typed “Boorloo”, the Nyungar name for the City of Perth.
Autocorrect had other ideas. It replaced it with “Barolo” – which, I thought, made for a fitting wine choice on the night.
It was an amusing moment, but also a revealing one. The system’s dictionary, trained largely on mainstream English data, didn’t know what Boorloo was, so it reached for a more familiar alternative. This seemingly minor miscorrection offers a glimpse into how language technologies are shaped – including which words they recognise, and which they overlook.
Why does this happen?
