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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Alan Horkan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], David Faure <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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
