Re: Some thoughts on grammar Nazis, LanguageTool, and the world in itself
On 2014-05-19 16:16, Juan Martorell wrote: Therefore my suggestion is that we discuss KPI in terms of performance and maintainability rather than in bring rules to LT and we set some goals. I remember there was a nice simplification effort some time ago. The more rules you have, the more difficult it becomes to add yet another rule that's really useful. But considering that there are several languages with less than 100 rules[1], I think adding rules there is one of the most useful things one can do. For languages with many rules, quality might be improved by evaluating LT against an error corpus. We have such an evaluation for English now (class RealWordCorpusEvaluator) that runs LT against Jenny Pedler's corpus of errors from people with dyslexia. By the way, the new rule editor has not been developed because I expect that hundreds of people will now contribute rules. Instead, it's an attempt to gain new long-term contributors, maybe even maintainers. We still don't have a maintainer for English, so there's nobody who sets a direction for what kind of rules are added or what kind of rules are disabled by default. Regards Daniel [1] https://languagetool.org/languages/ [2] http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~jenny/resources.html -- Accelerate Dev Cycles with Automated Cross-Browser Testing - For FREE Instantly run your Selenium tests across 300+ browser/OS combos. Get unparalleled scalability from the best Selenium testing platform available Simple to use. Nothing to install. Get started now for free. http://p.sf.net/sfu/SauceLabs ___ Languagetool-devel mailing list Languagetool-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/languagetool-devel
Some thoughts on grammar Nazis, LanguageTool, and the world in itself
Marcin wrote: This is perfect English and you could probably find Jane Austin or Charles Dickens using such constructions. I think this little discussion reveals a fundamental problem of an Open Source grammar checker, and perhaps of grammar checkers in general. In the back of my head, I've thought this for years. The more popular LT becomes over time, the more time we will probably have to spend fighting off prescriptivist poppycock[1]. There are a lot of people around who are well-meaning and intelligent and in some way interested in language and grammar, but are not trained linguists. This type of person will just take some grammar book (or even worse, a style manual) from their shelves and try to translate all the rules they happen to find there into LT rules, and they are unable to understand what the rule was originally intended to do. Eventually they end up doing more harm than good. The Hemingway app[2] is a good example of what I have in mind here. It complains about adverbs and gives useless advice such as 1 adverbs. Aim for 0 or fewer. The idea behind the rule is probably something like don't use verb + adverb if the same thought can be expressed more clearly by choosing a more descriptive verb, e.g. don't say She moved quickly. but rather She ran. The second sentence is easier to understand and expresses a fact more accurately with less words, so it is in some way an improvement over the first. But it is by no means trivial to translate this idea to the XML formalism, or (more generally speaking) to something a computer can understand. Running around and telling people not to use adverbs is certainly not the way to go, it is just confusing. My first thought when Daniel published the new rule editor was, Let's hope this tool will not bring us a bunch of grammar Nazis and nitpicky smartasses. These are just some thoughts I wanted to share. I'm not sure if I said something useful, or if these are just smartass remarks themselves. [1] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=5 [2] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=10416 -- Accelerate Dev Cycles with Automated Cross-Browser Testing - For FREE Instantly run your Selenium tests across 300+ browser/OS combos. Get unparalleled scalability from the best Selenium testing platform available Simple to use. Nothing to install. Get started now for free. http://p.sf.net/sfu/SauceLabs ___ Languagetool-devel mailing list Languagetool-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/languagetool-devel
Re: Some thoughts on grammar Nazis, LanguageTool, and the world in itself
Would it be possible to: - add a level of 'checking profiles' - that have the familiar categories - the categories just contain rule(set) id's (file_name+rule_id) - the rule-id's are stored in a number of rule files Of all profiles, just 1 can be active for the active language. This makes it pre-load all rules of that profile. Multiple files could make editing easier. Having just the rule id's in the category prevents redundancy of having rules in multiple profiles. Just a thought. Ruud -- Accelerate Dev Cycles with Automated Cross-Browser Testing - For FREE Instantly run your Selenium tests across 300+ browser/OS combos. Get unparalleled scalability from the best Selenium testing platform available Simple to use. Nothing to install. Get started now for free. http://p.sf.net/sfu/SauceLabs ___ Languagetool-devel mailing list Languagetool-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/languagetool-devel
