Question

I am interested in doing some AI/algorithmic explorations. So I have this idea to make a simple application kind of like hang man, were I assign a word and leave some letters as clues. But instead of a user guessing for the word I want to make my application try to figure it out based on the clues I leave it. Does anyone know where I should start? thanks.

Answer 1

Create a database of words of the desired language (index wikipedia dumps).
That probably shouldn’t exceed 1 million words.

Then you can simply query a database:

for example: fxxulxxs

–> SELECT * FROM T_Words WHERE word LIKE f__ul__s

–> fabulous

if there are more than 1 word in the return set, you need to return the one that is statistically the most used.

Another method would be to take a look at nhunspell

If you want to do it more analytically, you need to find a statistical method to correlate stems, endings and beginnings, or basically a measurement for word similarity.

Language research shows that you can easily read words when you only have the start and the ending. If you only have the middle, then it gets difficult.