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.

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.)