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A Useful Grammar Checker?
burtdub asks: "With the amount of raw text data available, there seems to be no shortage of ambitious language projects on the horizon, from Universal Language Translators to Junk Email Filtering. However, the mess that is the English language still seems to elude commercial attempts while being relatively ignored by the open source community. What would it take to make a useful, functional grammar checker?"
The best way to write a useful grammar checker is to write it for a language with a rational syntax.
People are always making these grammar checkers that work "from the inside out": look at the words, surround them with expectations of what words can agree with them grammatically, and flag contradictions. But humans are interactive with language, like everything else we do. Proper speakers and writers of English are good listeners (and readers). When we hear what we've said, we imagine what that would mean to us if it had been said to us. When the words make us think of something different from what we though before we said them, we correct ourselves. A better grammar checker might work "from the outside in": compose imagery or relationships between recorded objects as represented in the written words, and show implications to the writer, to match against their expectations.
That might be a mightily complex undertaking, akin to a machine "understanding" the words. But it would replicate the feedback we humans already use to keep our grammar correct, and to understand each other. If we aimed that high, we could probably find a less ambitious assistance that's easier to automate, but goes a long way towards helping us express our words to computers, and to each other using computers.
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make install -not war
I love Steven Pinker's remark about this; that we know the difference between young women looking for husbands and husbands looking for young women.
But there are some things a grammar checker could readily do; see if a verb should be able to accept a direct object, see if a sentence ends in a preposition, etc.
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It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
American and British English remain, for the most part, mutually intelligible. They have largely drifted together.
However, that has happened with a large english speaking population.
I'm expecting it to split over time into an international english, which will be largely today's american english, and whatever the english speaking countries drift into speaking. I suppose that they *could* be enough of an anchor to slow the mutation of the language, but I doubt it. I'm even more skeptical of the idea that the now established international english would follow the changes of the native speakers--there's no reason for a french-speaker and a korean speaker, both of whom speak english as an international language, to change their english due to americans or brits.
hawk
And you wonder why people are stranded on the side of the road with a flat they can't change. You can't abstract out all the mechanics of anything, no matter how advanced.
The problem is that "content" without proper mechanics loses all of it's value, and without proper mechanics built into the content generation process, thoughts are muddled and incoherent. There's no structure enforced. That's why people start thinking crap like Scientology is a good idea. They have no rational thought processes, they're governed solely by "content", ie "emotion". Kinda like the gorillas and monkeys you see in zoo exhibits.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Just look at jamaican english
http://niceup.com/patois.txt
some sample phrases:
"No cup no broke, no coffee no dash wey". Even if disaster strikes your home it's always possible
that all may not be lost. (22)
you don't make a fuss there won't be a fight. (29)
"Wha eye no see, heart no leap" means that something terrible could happen but if you don't
see it, you are not frightened. (29)
"mi come here fi drink milk, mi noh come here fi count cow". A remimder
to conduct business in a straightforward manner. (22)
"The higher the monkey climbs the more him expose". A truly comic image if
you've ever been to the zoo, and comforting to any of us whose backs have been
used as a stepping-stone for someone else's success. (22)
"A city upon the hill cannot be hidden." same as above (29)
I personally believe that language will just evolve so that our childrens children, will be almost incomprehensible to us. as you can see, having africans speak english for 400 years in jamaica gave them there own particular flavour of the language.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
French, for example, adjectives come after the noun they modify.
:)
Actually, that's only true for some adjectives. There is a rule to remember which ones go before the noun: 'BANGS'
B - beauty
A - age
N - numerical order
G - goodness (or badness)
S - size
Everything else goes after the noun.
This has been your online French grammar lesson for the day.
This requires some serious AI (or just plain I) to sort out. And that only gets you past the subject line. Now re-read each of the sentences in my opening paragraph, but literally this time. Each of them would choke a grammar checker, yet for most readers they will parse perfectly well within the context.
Easier just to pay attention in Grade 7 English class, as someone already pointed out.
But there are some things a grammar checker could readily do; see if a verb should be able to accept a direct object, see if a sentence ends in a preposition, etc.
Sure, but there are plenty of verbs in English that can take an object or not, and plenty of words where the meaning changes (sometimes subtley, sometimes not) depending on whether the verb has an object or not. For example: "I see the house", "I see" (subtle difference); "I'm moving the TV", "I'm moving" (bigger difference); "I'll hang the laundry", "I'll hang" (completely different meanings, though arguably different verbs -- just try teaching your computer that).
The other point is a bit pointless, as ending a sentence with a preposition is no longer considered bad grammar ("This is the type of pedantry up with which I will not put" -- Winston Churchill)
Nor is it considered bad grammar anymore to sloppily split infinitives.
For a machine grammar checker to work, it has to know rules. This can (theoretically) work in languages with rigid, well-defined and widely-folowed rules, but will not work so easily in English where there are so many exceptions.
Linguo: Sentence fragment. Lisa: Sentence fragment is also a sentence fragment.
Ah, what can't you learn from the simpsons?
Among other examples ....
.... neither the German pilot nor the young, inexperienced Cypriot co-pilot could speak the same language fluently, and each had difficulty understanding how the other spoke English, the worldwide language of air traffic control. ... ... ... ....
.... the crew at over 14,000 feet would already be experiencing some disorientation because of a lack of oxygen.
Crew confusion found in Athens plane crash
By Don Phillips International Herald Tribune
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2005
PARIS The crew members of a Cypriot airliner that crashed Aug. 14 near Athens became confused by a series of alarms as the plane climbed, failing to recognize that the cabin was not pressurizing until they grew mentally disoriented because of lack of oxygen and passed out....
The plane had a sophisticated new flight data recorder that provided a wealth of information.
At 10,000 feet, or 3,000 meters, as designed, an alarm went off to warn the crew that the plane would not pressurize.
At 14,000 feet, oxygen masks deployed as designed and a master caution light illuminated in the cockpit. Another alarm sounded at about the same time on an unrelated matter, warning that there was insufficient cooling air in the compartment housing avionics equipment.
The radio tapes showed that this created tremendous confusion
During this time, the German captain and the Cypriot co-pilot discovered they had no common language and that their English, while good enough for normal air traffic control purposes, was not good enough for complicated technical conversation in fixing the problem....
Jeez, how you younguns forget! In my day, we had style and diction, and we liked it. None of that fancy-schmancy parsing irregular grammar, just pattern match a few of the worst cases, throw out a few statistics, and wow!
Of course, that was when the line printer was state of the art, and you had to cut your printout into sheets to turn your English assignment in, and two or three nroff submissions could bring the PDP 11-44 to its knees...
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
Yes
(I'm guessing yes, but not significant ones).That depends on what you mean by "significant". Japanese has two different parts of speech that correspond to English "adjectives". Some languages fail to make distinctions found in English; Choctaw has nouns, verbs, and adverbs -- an nothing else--to prepositions, no adjectives, no quantifiers (ie. numerals or logical quantifiers.) All those three English categories are verbs in Choctaw. Some people have argued that the Salishan languages and some varieties of Indonesian have only a single part of speech: nouns are verbs are adjectives etc. That's a very controversial position. Most linguists believe there is at least a universal distinction between nouns and verbs.
When you are modelling language, you are modelling the mind.Sure -- perhaps most linguists alive today believe that, and have for a long time. The question is: when languages differ, does that reflect a difference in the minds of the people, or does it just show how incomplete our understanding of language and mind is? Some languages do not have different words for "blue" and "green" but careful tests show that they do in fact distinguish the colors. On the other hand, some languages do not distinguish "left" from "right", and careful tests show that they do not distinguish them (except perhaps in reference to oppossing body parts). The connection between language and mind is there, but not very straightforward (in this humble linguists opinion). I know you were talking about parts of speech, not individual lexical items, but you can apply the same issues to the differences pointed out above.
An open source grammar checker would be extremely useful.
They're not just usefull at catching mistakes, but also teaching grammer. Anyone who uses grammar checking often enough will eventually start writing correctly in order to reduce the amount of corrections they have to make. I know there were quite a few times after running a grammar check when those rules learned in school came flooding back. Of course, this is all null and void if the grammer check automatically fixes errors, but in my experience no such program exists.