Question:
What about a English grammar checker? Like the one in
Microsoft Word?
Answer:
I know something about parsing English sentences - several years ago,
longer than I want to think about, I wrote an English language parser
based on the description in Terry Winograd's _Language as a Cognitive
Process_. It was the subject of an article I wrote for Byte and was
planned as a part of a retrieval langauge for the European Space
Telescope (that never happened). It was also used at several
univeristies (U of Hawaii, for one).
I've never tried a grammar checker, but it seems to me the approach
should proceed from an attempted parsing of the sentences rather than a
bunch of ad hoc rules. Many years ago I used a grammar-checking product
that worked with Word 5.5 (on MS DOS) that also produced some useful
statistics: count of individual words, number of words, sentences,
sentence length statistics, and so on. A grammar checker could do these
things too.
So, anyway, I'm willing to work with others on such a project. If I can
find the parser, I can contribute that, as a start. I imagine a rewrite
of it is in order - it is written in C (before Bjarne Stroustrup
invented C++ which shows how long ago this was)..
But I have no understanding about how to add a component to OpenOffice.
I'd need some colaboration there - and on the design and execution of
the component. I don't have the time to do heavy lifting, but I can put
in 10-20 hours a week.
Submit Your
Own Answer!
