[Corpora-List] Grammar checker for English(?)

[Antti Arppe]

On Thu, 14 Apr 2005, Deane, Paul wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Maxwell [mailto:maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2005 10:39 PM
> To: Corrin Lakeland
> Cc: D.G.Damle; CORPORA at HD.UIB.NO
> Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Grammar checker for English
>
> Corrin Lakeland wrote:
> > On Tue, 12 Apr 2005 23:32, you wrote:
> >
> >> Does anyone have a technique or tool for checking the
> >> grammatical correctness of a sentence?
> >>
> >> A full parser would be computationally too expensive,
> >> so is there a computationally cheap method for this?
> >
> > I do not know of any systems which check if a sentence is
> >  well-formed without parsing it, although it is
> > theoretically possible to do. However, there are many
> > parsers that are quite efficient.
> >
> > ... I'm sure there is lots of other work in the field.
>
> (I didn't see the original msg for some reason, but I'm
> assuming it was posted to Corpora-List, hence a reply is
> appropriate.)

In my experience, parsers in practice typically assume that the input
language is more or less grammatically correct, and try to come up
with some sort of analysis for any given text. I.e. a parser can end
up outputting some sort of analysis for even a grammatically incorrect
sentence, which might be syntactically/structurally plausible but
semantically incorrect.

As I haven't seen the original posting, I'm not fully sure whether
this query is restricted to grammar checking of English or languages
in general.

Nevertheless, in the case of Swedish, I participated in 1997-1999 in a
project to develop a grammar checker for that language. In our project
we used the Constraint Grammar (CG) formalism as a sort of pattern
matching algorithm to detect certain types of grammatically incorrect
sequences. The major difficulty was not in describing what type of
sequence was incorrect, given that the sequence was an instance of
some particular grammatical structure such as a noun phrase, but
ensuring that the scrutinized sequence indeed did form the structure
for which the grammar rule would apply. In fact, this tool does not
attempt to fully parse the input text, though the grammar checking
component is preceded by part-of-speech disambiguation.

This work is documented in the following two articles:

Birn, Juhani 2000. Detecting grammar errors with Lingsoft^Òs Swedish
grammar-checker. In: Nordgård, T. (ed.) Proceedings from the 12th
Nordiske datalingvistikkdager, Trondheim, December 9-10, 1999.
Department of Linguistics, Norwegian Univer-sity of Science and
Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway.

Arppe, Antti 2000. Developing a Grammar Checker for Swedish. In:
Nordgård, T. (ed.) Proceedings from the 12th Nordiske
datalingvistikkdager, Trondheim, December 9-10, 1999. Department of
Linguistics, Norwegian University of Sci-ence and Technology (NTNU),
Trondheim, Norway.

I hope these might be of some assistance.

-- 
======================================================================
Antti Arppe - Master of Science (Engineering)
Researcher & doctoral student (Linguistics)
E-mail: antti.arppe at helsinki.fi
WWW: http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/~aarppe
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