Developer finds auto-correct dictionary swapping common words with accented proper nouns
A Brazilian developer built a script to automatically fix Portuguese accent marks in AI-generated text using a dictionary of over 90,000 words. She discovered the dictionary itself was incorrectly replacing common words like 'pele' (skin) with 'Pelé' and 'teve' (had) with 'tevê' (TV). The errors were silent and produced fluent, grammatically correct text, making them nearly impossible to detect without careful manual review. The root cause was that the dictionary had mapped unaccented words to their proper-noun or less-common accented forms, without accounting for real-world frequency. The developer concluded that truly ambiguous words should not be resolved automatically, and that any correction tool must be validated by a second check that does not rely on the same data source.
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