Thomas wrote:
But consider this example: "An inyanga is a traditional healer." If the attributes were set correctly and the sentence will get broken up accordingly we will have: a) "An" b) "inyanga" c) "is a traditional healer."
Since all of those text are incomplete as sentence the grammar checker would have to mark all of them as *grammatically* wrong and has a hard time to give suggestions.
That is why my earlier message suggested throwing the paragrpah at the grammr checker for each language used in the pragraph, and flagging the errors returned by the grammr checkers in different colors. In this example, the English grmmar checker would return "inyanga" as "unknown word". The Zulu grammar checker would kick out "inyanga" as "correct grammar", and flag the rest as "unknown words". People who mix two or more languages in the same phrase should expect to have to proofread their material, because grammar checkers won't trap polylingual errors.
And if you think about it a grammar checker may already have such kind of heuristics (to treat unknown words as noun, verb, ...) implemented because it already has to deal with this
That depends upon both the type of language, and what the grammar checker does, to verify that the grammar is accurate. Au Gramadoir breaks the word up into its various components, then reassembles it to verify that the grammar is correct. If the word is not in its database, it flags it as an error. It may, or my not offer suggestions.
problem when someone makes a typo and it can not properly be
determined what word it should have been. Character pairs and triplets point the spell checker to the most probable word. EG: "sfff" won't be corrected to "added", but "addad" would be. [I'll skip the rest of probability theory here.] Depending on the language, the grammar checker might be able to guess at the part of speech, based upon letter pairs, or triplets. It more likely will use them to evalute whether or nto the word was in the target language, or not.
And it is surely a requirement for a grammar checker to not give upon
grammar checking because it does not know a specific word. Some grammr checkers have a 'feature' that determines the probability of an unknown word being in the language that it is checking. It treats the unknown word as an error, but the error message differs according to whether or not the unknown word is a foreign language. Depending upon the language, "giving up", and flagging unknown words as an error, might be the safest thing for a grammar checker to do.
Otherwise it would be required that a text has no spelling errors before it can be grammar checked.
Taking the example: "The inyanga is a traditional healer." The spelling checker would have to verify that "inyanga" was correctly spelled. Since that is a noun, it _should_ be in the list of words checked by the Zulu spelling checker. If it was a verb, it probably would not be in the spell checker. xan jonathon -- Ethical conduct is a vice. Corrupt conduct is a virtue. Motto of Nacarima.
