Hi!
I'm Myriam Lechelt, the person who worked on a french grammar checker
with Laurent Godard.
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.
It's true that we can check many errors with context, especialy
"phonetic errors", just like you said pear/pair.
But it's sure that it's not sufficient. Grammatical relations are
complicate. We need more than context to detect some errors like
agreement (for example Noun-Verb agreement). In french for example,
verb is not always just next to the noun. So we can not check errors
only with the context, we need to analyse grammatical fonctions. We have
to find the noun group and the verbal group and see if their attributes
(person, gender, number...) can match. If they don't match, there is an
error.
Besides, we saw that contextual detection of errors is very long, and we
know that we could never be exhaustive.
But we know that a perfect grammar checker is not impossible (we still
have works to do ;-) ).
We could say that contextual checker can detect many errors but is not
enough performant if we want to have a real good and as exhaustive as
possible checker.
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].
Maybe, one day we could be able to treat meaning of sentences, but I'm
not really sure that grammar checker has to do that. "the banana is red"
is grammaticaly correct.
Meaning is at an other level, we're not here yet!
Best wishes
Myriam
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