Professor Finds Fault with MS Grammar Checker

ChuckOp writes " front-page article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer states: "The University of Washington associate professor has embarked on a one-man mission to persuade the Redmond company to improve the grammar-checking function in its popular word-processing program. Sandeep Krishnamurthy is also trying to raise public awareness of the issue." He includes some twisted prose that the grammar checker fails to find fault with, such as: "Marketing are bad for brand big and small. You Know What I am Saying?" and "Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft". This last comment is disputed by retired Microsoft researcher Karen Jensen, who developed part of the underlying technology; "Only by knowing that 'Gates' probably refers to Bill Gates -- and not to the plural of the movable portion of a fence -- would the program know to suggest using 'does' instead." The professor also has several twisted examples available."

Comments

Re:Oh I See!

[Jakeypants]

I submit that "definitely" is the most commonly misspelled word here. Or perhaps "schedule" or "tomorrow."

Re:It's only a simple tool! Use your knowledgebase

[morcheeba]

Yeah, but it has pretty much killed the market for this type of software. There was a time when you bought a grammar checker as an add-on package from a different vendor.

Re:Marketing are good.

[CyberLife]

This highlights a noticeable difference between the British and American dialects of English. Britons tend to refer to groups of people in the plural sense (e.g. marketing are good). Americans, however, tend to refer to groups of people in the singular sense (e.g. marketing is good). Neither way is more or less correct than the other -- just different.

Open source grammar checking tools

[derek_farn]

There are two open source grammar checkers available (Language tool and Queequeg ). Both have strengths and weaknesses and could do with a lot more work to improve on the number strengths they have. Unfortunately people with the necessary expertise rarely have the time needed to get involved on these kinds of projects. If anybody is interested and has some expertise then send me some email. Perhaps we produce something better.

Re:Linux Grammar checker

[sewagemaster]

Does anybody know of any grammar checkers for Linux ???

There's Queequeg, which is based on wordnet.

You would need to feed in text files for these to work. I haven't found any text editors that have automatic grammar checking on the fly like MSWord though. Would be interesting if someone writes a plugin for gedit, for grammar checking, just like the way they already have automatic spell checking which uses ispell/aspell as the backend.

(heck, they don't even have automatic spell checking [on-the-fly] for kate (or kile) after seeing the feature request in bugs.kde.org for years. It can be quite troublesome when editing large latex documents.)

Didn't You Read The FAQ?

[Greyfox]

WE don't /. those sites. When a story is posted on /., gigantic machines in the /. basement go to work consuming every bit of bandwith to the site, thus preventing anyone from accidentally being tempted to read TFA before posting. This process stops (for the most part) once the next story's posted, as everyone will have posted in the previous story by then.

Glad to have cleared that up.

Re:It's only a simple tool! Use your knowledgebase

[Faterson]

I occasionally send documents to others who are not as wise to the many problems associated with MS Grammar check. They open it up and see that there are a bunch of green lines and think that I don't know anything about grammar.

I circumvent that by having recorded a macro that, after you highlight a portion of the text and press the assigned keyboard shortcut, instructs Word to ignore that passage in its spelling/grammar check. I run those macros when I do my final rereading of the texts just before I submit them.

Re:Oh I See!

[Storlek]

Lose vs. loose:

Now, spelling /luz/ as "loose" is a very likely and natural error to make: "lose" is one of only two English words, and the only verb, with /uz/ spelled "ose" (the spelling of possessive "whose" is equally surprising); the very common verb "choose" has /uz/ spelled "oose"; and anyway there's another very common word "loose" already hanging around.

- Language Log