From: Alan Horkan (horkana@tcd.ie)
Date: Wed Sep 04 2002 - 09:38:39 EDT
Forwarding as requested.
as for grammar checking i just want people to stop saying 'mute point' and
'peir review' but then Slashdot is notorious for its interpretation of the
English langauge. (should be: moot point, peer review)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2002 15:24:51 +0200
From: Daniel Naber <daniel.naber@t-online.de>
To: Alan Horkan <horkana@tcd.ie>
Cc: michael@moria.de, David Faure <david@mandrakesoft.com>
Subject: Re: Forward: Grammar checker info (fwd)
On Wednesday 04 September 2002 14:19, you wrote:
> this is a forward of a message i just sent to the abiword mailinglist
Hi Alan,
please also forward my response to the mailing list (I'm not subscribed).
Cc: to the author of style/diction, so he can correct me if I'm wrong.
Cc: to David Faure so he also know's what going on :-)
> It might nearly be easier to integrate a Perl based grammar checker into
> an built Abiword with Perl support than requiring Python.
Even if that's the case, Perl really isn't the appropriate language for
such a high level task as grammar checking is.
> The Gnu Style and Diction utilities
> http://www.gnu.org/software/diction/diction.html
This seems to be a rule based system that warns you if a single word
triggers a warning. E.g., if you use "its", it will always warn you that
you maybe meant "it's".
My system analyses the part-of-speech for each word and only warns if e.g.
"its" is probably wrong, according to the context. That means that with my
system you'll get less false alarms, but some errors might also be missed.
It's also rule based, but you can specifiy the rules in an XML file where
you can refer to words and their POS tags (e.g. you can specify a rule
that gets triggered if "its" is followed by a verb, which is probably
wrong, but not always).
So the difference is that diction isn't a grammar checker (and doesn't try
to be, the manpage doesn't even mention the word "grammar"), whereas my
system has support to find at least a few grammar errors like "missing -s
with third person verb".
Of course it can still make sense to integrate diction as a plugin, but one
shouldn't call it grammar checker. Also, as I said, my system in its
current state should not be integrated beacause it's being re-written
anyway.
> The Link Grammar checker
> http://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/
Actually it's not "Link Grammar checker" but "Link Grammar", i.e. it's a
parser. It basically only tells you if it could parse your sentence or
not, i.e. it doesn't tell you where and what the problem is. Also one must
expect that there are sentences which are correct but cannot be parsed.
Parsing basically assumes that a sentence is correct only when it can be
parsed, my tool assumes that a sentence is correct unless there's a rule
that explicitly says it's incorrect.
> Did they ever get back in touch with any of the abiword developers about
> letting AbiWord use the Link Grammar checker under a GPL compatible
> license?
I think I found in the archive that they said "okay, it'll become GPL with
the next version".
Regards
Daniel
-- http://www.danielnaber.de
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