On 14 Jun 2006 at 10:30, M. Luke Myers wrote: > How can something like a contextual spell checker be possible? It seems > too good to be true.
Many of these sorts of errors are easy to catch using regular expressions. For example, a rule that looks for 'pear of' and suggests replacing it with 'pair of' will usually be correct. It will get confused occasionally with sentences such as 'it was a pear of delicate flavour', but usually it will be OK. More sophisticated grammar checkers might do more processing to prevent incorrect changes from being suggested, but I don't think any current systems really understand the meaning of the sentence. I doubt that we'll be seeing sentences such as 'the banana is red' marked for change to 'the banana is yellow' any time soon ;-) [i.e. I think my job as a copy editor is safe for the forseeable future]. Part-of-speech grammar checkers can do things that would be hard/impossible to code as regular expressions (e.g. checking for missing verbs). Hand-tuned style/grammar checkers can find things that are probably errors even though they are grammatical. This is why it will be useful for OOo to support multiple grammar checkers running at once. Best wishes Matthew -- Matthew Strawbridge http://www.philoxenic.com (01353) 663650 Bespoke software development and freelance technical copy editing --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
