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Comment by jmm5 | Hacker News Reader

Trivial for Apple to compile a list of all medications and fix this.

What's next? When texting with technical employees, it annoys me that the iPhone tries to correct Linux commands or programming snippets. Should Apple have to feed /usr/share/man/ to the autocorrect corpus?

Well, why not? Ideally it should detect the language(s) you're using and use an appropriate word list, and surely subject context would be just as useful?

Of course, not everyone actually wants autocorrect. For me it's about 50% helpful and 50% a hindrance.

Agreed, why not? Why should dictionaries not be improved? They're constantly in motion except for dead languages like Latin and Greek.

What could also work is having multiple hooks (different "niche" dictionaries) which could be enabled or disabled.

In SwiftKey you can select multiple languages (dictionaries) which should be supported (and corrected, if you opt for that option).

But what I mean is that say a user could enable a medication dictionary, or a UNIX manual dictionary, or a law dictionary, or...

Would it lead to fewer cases of mistaken pharmaceutical identity to exclude medication names from the autocorrect dictionary, or to include them?

While maintaining a list is impractical, there are some branding conventions for medication that could be exploited

You're joking right?

Isn't there a database of medications? Parse that and include it in the dictionary.

https://druginfo.nlm.nih.gov/drugportal/, for example.

Like most things, it only seems simple from a distance. Between branded, generic, ingredient, and chemical names, there is diversity and ambiguity in drug naming.

It seems you both are correct... And that's where the problem originates

My Database/Company (https://www.drugbank.ca) contains a list of CC0 names they could use that are international, and it's updated daily.

They seem to have no problem autocorrecting brand names and trademarks. Why wouldn't they do this for something as important as medication?

Given how similar drug names can be, for future proofing, you'd want the auto-correct dictionary to blacklist drug names (trademarks, international nonproprietary names, alternative chemical names if there are any, etc...).

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