Walt Mossberg likes Contextual Spelling

In his review today of the new Office 2007, Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal says:

There are other nice additions. In Word, Outlook and PowerPoint, there is now contextual spell checking, which points to a wrong word, even if the spelling is in the dictionary. For example, if you type "their" instead of "they're," Office catches the mistake. It really works.

The team that developed this is justifiably pretty excited about this feature.  What's especially neat is that this is developed, not through a brute force list of commonly-misspelled terms, but through a statistical algorithm that can "guess" mispellings based on its experience reading zillions of documents.  That makes it easier to expand to many more languages, plus it will get better and better the more text it is trained on.