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A Useful Grammar Checker?

Posted by Cliff on from the what-set-of-rules-do-you-use dept.

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?"

5 of 503 comments (clear)

  1. Make it for Latin by ari_j · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

    1. Re:Make it for Latin by parvenu74 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. Re:How about LEARNING the English language? by PitaBred · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  3. adjective-noun order in French by Tumbleweed · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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. :)

  4. Fruit flies like a banana by BlueStraggler · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.