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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."
By visiting his site, I found out that he is the Associate Professor of Marketing and E-Commerce, and I was played right into his hand and visited his site! I bet he's laughing with his colleague from the Department of Statistics right now.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
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. Krishnamurthy is also trying to raise public awareness of the issue.
It's a tool that's not meant to take the place of actual proof-reading. The grammar checker included w/Word should only alert you to the possibility of some generic issues. If you are turning in, presenting, or distributing some paper you created I would suggest that you take the time and check over it yourself. After you check over it I suggest you have someone else check it over too.
Microsoft calls that the fundamental issue. Responding to an inquiry about Krishnamurthy's examples, the Microsoft Office group said in a statement that the grammar checker "was created to be a guide and a tool, not a perfect proofreader." Microsoft also makes that point in Word's product documentation.
Why should MSFT be held to some high standard for a tool that they include in their software? They should be forced to change it because some college student doesn't understand that "Marketing are good" isn't grammatically correct? Blame the student and their previous education not a tool that MSFT offers.
"If you're a grad student turning in your term paper, and you think grammar check has completely checked your paper, I have news for you -- it really hasn't," he said.
Perhaps require your students to hand in a draft first and you can tell them. In my experience very few professors cared about grammar, spelling, or even the basic content of the paper. How are these students supposed to know what they are doing is wrong if no one will take the time to teach it to them? MSFT is supposed to do that now?
"If you're including a feature in a widely used program like Microsoft Word, it's got to pick up more things than it currently does," he said. "I agree, the English language is very complicated, but I think we should expect more from grammar check."
Come on. I expect that out of my college education I should have at least earned the right to have a professor take the time out of their busy schedule to check over my paper for me. Most would glance over it and say it's fine. I only had *two* that actually spent the time to tear my papers down and show me what was wrong so that I wouldn't make those mistakes again. Does this professor want to do that or does he just want to berate MSFT for not doing it?
But how did a marketing and e-commerce professor become a grammar-checking crusader?
The professor is careful to point out that he's not out to bash Microsoft. But he says the company is spending too much energy on extraneous capabilities, while neglecting core features such as the grammar checker.
Sounds like bashing to me especially considering he's a Marketing prof with a background in e-commerce. I wonder what his intentions really are for this "one man crusade". The grammar checker is not a core feature IMHO. I use it as a tool to give me some quick direction but I certainly don't consider it to be the end-all and I certainly wouldn't tell my students to use it if I was a professor.
Any automated tool that parses something as complicated and subject to variation as English grammar is going to have issues. A serious writer isn't going to rely on the MS Word grammar checker to be their sole indicator if something is written poorly. I think of it more as a tool to catch the blitheringly obvious, not the subtle details. But then again, his examples do seem pretty blitheringly obvious...
You mean people don't turn that shit off immediately after installing Office?
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
I mean come on. I'm not even a MS fan and I agree that their product could get better, but if you're going to write like a 4 year old... And it would be different if the product's purpose was souly to check grammar. It's NOT. There's a point at which the user has to step in and use some sense and actually EDIT their work themselves.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
I wish they would improve the spellchecker too. I myself am dyslexic and often have to use google to correct my spelling when the Office spellchecker lets me down.
Ms Jensen doesn't note that the example is STILL incorrect even if one doesn't assume Gates is a proper noun. Grammatically, it should be, "Gates do good marketing jobs in Microsoft." Plural JOBS.
Of course, the chances of seeing a Jobs in Microsoft these days are probably nil.
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
Anybody know how the grammar checkers in alternative office suites are? Star Office, Open Office, Word Perfect, etc.?
I agree that there are many shortcomings in Microsoft's grammar checker. However, to what extent should we bother trying to improve it? English is an extraordinarily complex language and it should be easy to construct "twisted" examples which any grammar checker would miss; any standard intro AI course will warn of the dangers of overfitting data anyway. On the other end of the spectrum, I'm sure it's easy to construct examples which the grammar checker will never allow but which are often perfectly acceptable under certain circumstances. English grammar simply isn't as black and white as, say, C syntax, no matter what we geeks would like. :-)
By the way, can anyone suggest a better alternative for grammar checking than the one in ms office?
I'd rather have a program that points out the typical mistakes that occur when you cut and paste around, i.e. phrases without a verb, or with too many verbs, than one that is giving false alarms all the time. A grammar checker cannot fix a bad writer. Neither a spell checker, for that matter. (Do you write "advise" or "advice"?)
Personally, I don't use grammar checkers (not available for Emacs AFAIK anyway), and a spell checker only if I doubt about a particular word. There are way too many words in the kind of things that I write that make the spell checker freak out.
BTW, I probably made a mistake or two in this posting. My excuse is that I ain't no native speaker. :)
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If the MLA would come up with a formal specification of the English language that was a recursively enumerable language it wouldn't be so fucking hard to parse the language. They could at least formalize things like order-of-operations regarding clauses and enumerated lists and give a better set of punctuation to work with. They should choose whether they want the language to be pure communications medium with a formal syntax or if they want it to be a completely flexible means of artistic expression full of nuances and hints that can only be understood by a sentient being who has studied the language in-depth for many years.
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Wired article as proof
> Why should MSFT be held to some high standard
> for a tool that they include in their software?
You're kidding, right?
This isn't a mission critical piece of software included with Windows OS. It's an extraneous tool included with Word to help and guide people to realize that there might be an issue with their writing.
"I certainly wouldn't tell my students to use it if I was a professor."
Why the hell not? It's far from perfect, but it still will catch bad grammar 9 times out of 10, so I fail to see how this makes it useless.
Yes, you still have to proofread. However, proofreading is imperfect, especially when it's your own work and you don't have time to set it down and come back to it with a fresh perspective. At least the grammar checker will highlight most of your mistakes, and the false positives can be quickly evaluated and ignored.
Yes, it could be significantly better, but that doesn't mean it's useless. You just have to know its limitations.
This isn't something new. People have known for years that the grammar checker is less than perfect. Now, if this were a developer saying, "Well, it would be better if you did..." I would have a lot more respect for the article. I can point out problems with lots of things left and right, and without giving a good, reasonable solution, simply pointing them out is what we generally call complaining.
I'm far from a fan of Microsoft, but since I work for a literacy program funded by the U.S. Government, I am adequately shocked that people use grammar check for anything more than catching where they mistyped "th estory" instead of "the story" and similar such mistakes. Also being a college student, I find myself re-reading my papers quite often, and generally fixing a few mistakes in my original text. Few, if any, of these would have been found by the grammar checker.
Then again, I guess you could also say I have an agenda to UN-automate the process of checking spelling and grammar, as it seems to me it's growing to be one of those automated features that doesn't just serve in time-saving, but also extends to the dumbing of America. Not just the, "I don't care" kind of dumb, but also the "I don't have any need to care" kind.
Please, get over it.
By all means use a spell checker but if you've spend days/weeks/months writing a paper, the least you can do is spend a few hours reading it for grammatical errors!
So, what we have here is somebody just saying, in essense, "Gee, Microsoft, why isn't your software at human-level AI? I mean, how hard can that be?" and is so utterly incompetent at assessing how hard grammar checking is that they are utterly unaware of how incompetent they are. (Hmmm, that sounds familiar, though this isn't quite the same.)
I invite Associate Professor of Marketing and E-Commerce Sandeep Krishnamurthy to try his hand at the AI problems he is upset that Microsoft hasn't waved a magic wand and fixed, though I feel obligated to warn him that as an associate professor of marketing, he's likely to be in for a world of intellectual hurt unless he's got some other source of knowledge and skill squirreled away somewhere, like a PhD in Computer Science he is for some reason forgetting to mention.... Perhaps then he would have some understanding of why even the mighty Microsoft has not yet produced the Perfect Grammar Checker....
On that note, check in with actual Linguists on the feasibility of the idea of a Perfect Grammar, too. You probably have a lot to learn there, too.
Instead of moaning, Mr. Krishnamurthy should write a brief and complete Rules of English Grammar for his friends across town. For reference, he can use Elements of English Grammar: Rules Explained Simply (310 pages) or Rules, Patterns and Words : Grammar and Lexis in English Language Teaching (Cambridge Language Teaching Library) (246 pages).
English grammar is complex and often twisted in its logic. Its amazing that the MS Word grammar checker works so well.
It should only be used by people who understand grammar. It's the same with spell checkers. You have to know the difference between there, they're, and their before you can use one.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Trying to think of something profound to say, but the grammar checker is pretty short of profound. I use Word for hours most days, and I certainly feel like the grammar checker is of limited utility. The simple spelling checking part of it delivers far and away the most bang for the buck. The grammar checker only contributes slightly, and that's usually by recognizing ambiguities. It doesn't help fix them, but if I can simplify the grammar to the point where the grammar checker stops complaining, then the passage is often rendered more clearly.
I think doing more would require a level of semantic understanding which is still far, far above the capabilities of our PCs, even given their gigahertz frequencies. Trying to substitute for real intelligence is difficult. The only thing I can imagine might be a very large database of examples of good and bad grammar examples, accessed via the Internet. The problem of deciding good and bad would still remain. Perhaps a Wikipedia-style approach with volunteer evaluators?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Thus far, it's the best grammar checker I've seen. Far from perfect, certianly, but I've never had anyone show me one that was any better.
You have to remember that grammar checking is much harder than spell checking. Basically, all a spell checker needs is a dictonary of words. If a given word isn't found in the dictonary, it is marked as incorrect. You may get a high rate of false positives if your dictonary sucks, but you'll basically never miss anything.
Grammar is harder since now we are dealing with types of words and how they go together. You can't have a database of sentences and check against that, there just isn't the space to hold all that, never mind the ability to generate it. So you have to use hurestics of some kind to analyze the words and see if the match up based on your rules.
Also what the rules are is somewhat hard to decide. Natural languages grow and change. What was fine 50 years ago in English isn't necessiarly fine today. Plus there are different standards to which one might be held. There are things that are allowable in normal conversational speech that aren't in a scholarly paper.
Basically, if he thinks he can make or can point out a better grammar checker, be my guest, but at this point it just sounds like so much whining. He wants perfection in an imperfect field.
"Would I use an intelligent grammar check? Yes, by all means. [... goes on to make suggestions ...]"
What you're missing is the fact that this is one of the hardest problems ever tackled by computer science. Not only that, but even a moderate improvement over what MS does now would likely require an order of magnitude more code and run-time computation, making it inappropriate for most usage!
MS Word does an OK job of spotting the most common errors, but if you're better at it than MS Word is, just shut the thing off. There, no problems.
As far as writing something that you KNOW is incorrect... ok, so you get a green line under text that you already know is a problem, but you don't intend to change. No big deal. Why is this an imposition?
I always found that a good 'grammer checker' was to use a text to speach program if you don't have anyone else to read your own paper. This caught more erros for me than MS's grammer check. I can't blame MS for this. The English and I'm sure many languages are really hard to break down in to a set of rules a computer can understand given so much is based on the context.
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It does have one important use that I have found, though. I have this bad habit (as you may have already noticed) of rambling on and on and on and writing extremely long sentences. These aren't technically grammatical mistakes, of course, but the Word grammar check will still warn me about them so I know what needs to be tweaked/rewritten.
For my assignments these days, however, I prefer to use emacs/vim/vi, and I've been teaching myself how to format in Latex as well. I frequently take advantage of the spellcheck in emacs, of course, but for the most part I just don't worry about it and fix any minor errors that I might find when I proofread.
(Disclaimer: When writing a /. post, I am not in uber-careful essay mode, so my spelling and grammar may be erratic.)
You know why no one's complained about the apparent lack of a grammar checker for Linux?
No one uses it! Even when using MS Word, I look at the suggested grammar corrections and say, "Oh, that's nice. Whatever." Then, I go on writing and fix errors myself.
In other words, in order to operate a mule, you must first be smarter than the mule.
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
It does have one important use that I have found, though. I have this bad habit (as you may have already noticed) of rambling on and on and on and writing extremely long sentences. These aren't technically grammatical mistakes, of course, but the Word grammar check will still warn me about them so I know what needs to be tweaked/rewritten.
Perhaps. But while I'm also a rather Nathaniel Hawthorne-esque writer in terms of my sentence lengths, that does NOT make it incorrect, nor does it necessarily make it more difficult to read. (My previous sentence would have been flagged in Word, yet if you read it, you notice that it has decent flow and is easy to understand.)
What bothers me the most is that Word's grammar checker assumes you're an idiot. Every single time that I have it enabled and use a semicolon, it flags it, saying "Semicolon use". Based on the way I see that "correction" used, it assumes that the person writing is stupid and MUST have used it mistakenly. Even in the best of light, this method is rude, merely because it second-guesses you every time. I KNOW how to use a semicolon, dammit, and I'll do it when I damn well please.
I can understand why they have it do this; since semicolons are meant to tie two related clauses together, it makes it more difficult to guage whether the two sentences on either side of the semicolon are correctly tied together. Instead, they merely flag it every time it's used. But man, do I ever get the feeling that it's insulting my intelligence.
I tend to shut off the grammar checker and instead I only use the spellcheck function. Even then, I tend to add strange things to the custom dictionary, so that when I use certain phrases or intentional misspellings (such as "dammit", above) it doesn't fuss at me.
I agree with what other people here are saying though: There is NO substitute for proper proofing.
Heck, until any other word-processor does it.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"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."
Even if the program assumes that "gates" is a plural common noun, and not a singular proper noun, shouldn't a remotely decent grammar checker still find fault with this sentence (beyond it's nonsensical nature)? Along with accidentally repeated double words, mixing singular and plural nouns/verbs is one lf the only things that the grammar check seems to actually be good for.
It seems like a halfway decent grammar checker in this case would at least recommend "Gates do good marketing jobs in Microsoft"
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
This guy needs to look up "AI Complete". Natural language parsing is not just a common example, it is *the* canonical example, the one that is NEVER left out of ANY serious discussion of the issue. Of *course* their grammar checker is worthless; *every* computer grammar checker is worthless (unless it's checking the grammar for a computer language, as opposed to a human language).
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I'm a senior in the English Department at the University of Washington. I can tell you for a fact grammar has gone by the wayside. Last quarter, in my advanced expository writing class my teacher gave a room full of English majors a grammar quiz. Five out of twenty people understood when to use "whom". Two people could use "to lay" and "to lie" and their respective participles correctly. One person (me) found all the errors in the paragraph at the end of the test. This is not a class filled with freshman--this is an upper-level English class at a major University.
Part of the blame rests on the complexity involved with parsing language. That particular class relied heavily on peer review simply because editing is hard, time consuming work, even if you know all the rules. An instructor reading twenty rough drafts of a ten page paper cannot reply meaningfully to every one in a couple of hours. Content and structure always outweigh grammar and spelling when a teacher had limited time to really look at a student's work.
The other part of the blame arises from hubris associated with grammar. If you tell someone that they need to work on their grammar, they will probably think that you're insinuation that they return to grade school. I think studying grammar should not be relegated the ESL students and middle-schoolers. If you can tell me what the subjunctive mood is without looking it up or use a dash, colon and semicolon without fear then more power to you. If you cannot, perhaps MS Word's grammar checker isn't the only thing that needs a rehaul.
Insightful, lucid, and grammatically-correct writing is a by-product of hard, relentless work that cannot (yet) be replicated.
It saddens me that a lot of people don't have "whom" in their vocabulary. I use it correctly... and I don't exactly have a privileged upbringing or anything. Nor do I know English in any technical sense, so I couldn't explain where you are supposed to use "whom" using the correct linguistic terms.
Ah well. One of the major strengths of English is that it can change, so I suppose there's no point making a fuss about it. But I'll defend my little patch of English :-)
Oh, and, on topic... this is dumb. There isn't a single system in existence for which you cannot construct examples that'll make it look bad. Indeed, I believe attention has moved away from hand-coding rules with the goal of achieving perfection, and towards statistical techniques. 100% correctness might be impossible but they get the job done with a lot less hassle.
If you think about it, it's impossible for an exception to confirm a rule. However an exception may well test or challenge how the rule is formulated. Try it out with this one: even numbers are never prime. Does the existence of 2 confirm it?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."