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?"

Comments

Make it for Latin

[ari_j]

The best way to write a useful grammar checker is to write it for a language with a rational syntax.

Re:Make it for Latin

[parvenu74]

Rational syntax? Latin? It's one of the few languages in which you can scramble the order of the words in the sentence and not loose any meaning because the word carries enough meta-data in the form of all of the various endings. Heck, regular verbs alone have 140 different forms, and irregular verbs are exactly that, with unique endings per item. And who's to say that the "nominative-ablative-dative-accusative-verb" syntactical ordering is either correct or ideal? Cicero doesn't write like that half of the time and Caesar almost never did in his "Gallic Wars." And consider that the Catholic Church, which has used Latin as its official language longer than the Romans did, has adopted a simplified vulgatum form officially, not that the various Popes and writers throughout the centuries have bothered to use that instead of the higher-browed Classical Latin.... whose rules are you proposing to follow?

English might actually be an easier task than trying to parse Latin.

Re:Make it for Latin

[cfuse]

We must polish the Polish furniture.

He could lead if he would get the lead out.

The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.

Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.

A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.

When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.

I did not object to the object.

The bandage was wound around the wound.

The farm was used to produce produce.

The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.

The insurance was invalid for the invalid.

There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.

They were too close to the door to close it.

The buck does funny things when the does are present.

A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.

To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.

The wind was too strong to wind the sail.

After a number of injections my jaw got number.

Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.

I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.

How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?

Biofeedback

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Re:How about LEARNING the English language?

[PitaBred]

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.

adjective-noun order in French

[Tumbleweed]

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. :)

Re:adjective-noun order in French

[P0ldy]

And yet, neither this nor the "adjectives-always-following" former accounts for those adjectives whose meaning changes depending on its placement.

Whereas "ma chambre propre" means "my clean room", "ma propre chambre" means "my own room".

Fruit flies like a banana

[BlueStraggler]

Is fruit an adjective or a noun? Is flies a noun or a verb? Is like a verb or an adjective?

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.