Showing papers by "George A. Miller published in 1957"

The reconstruction of mutilated english texts

Abstract: The ability of human operators to correct mutilations in printed English texts was studied for a variety of mutilations. The average person, given limited time to work, will not be able to correct passages perfectly if more than 10% of the characters are mutilated; the job is most difficult if the mutilation consists of random substitutions of erroneous characters. With superior persons and unlimited time, however, it is possible to abbreviate passages as much as 50%, either by omitting alternate characters or by omitting all the vowels and the space between words. These results correspond to a lower bound of 60% for the redundancy of printed English.