A Prototype of a Grammar Checker for Czech

A Prototype of a Grammar Checker for Czech i Tomtit, Holan Dept.of Software and Computer Science Education Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic holan @ksvi.ms.mff.cuni.cz Vladislav Kubofi lnst.of Formal and AppI.Ling. Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic vk@u fal.ms.mff.cuni.cz Martin Plfitek Dept.of Theoretical Comp.Sc. Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic platek@kA:i.ms.mff.cuni.cz Abstract This paper describes the implementation of a prototype of a grammar based grammar checker for Czech and the basic ideas behind this implementation. The demo is implemented as an independent program cooperating with Microsoft Word. The grammar checker uses specialized grammar formalism which generally enables to check errors in languages with a very high degree of word order freedom. Introduction Automatic grammar checking is one of the fields of natural language processing where simple means do not provide satisfactory results. This statement is even more true with respect to grammar checking of the so-called free word order languages. With the growing degree of word order freedom the usability of simple pattern matching techniques decreases. In languages with such a high degree of word order freedom as in most Slavic languages the set of syntactic errors that may be detected by means of simple pattern matching methods is almost negligible. This is probably one of the reasons, why even though the famous paper [CH83] was written as long as 13 years ago, there are still very few articles about this topic, except papers like [K94] or [M96] which appeared only during the last three years. In the present paper we describe the basic ideas behind an implementation of a prototype of a grammar checker for Czech. During the development of this application we had to solve a number of problems concerning the theoretical background, to develop a formalism allowing efficient implementation and of course to create a grammar and define the structure of the lexical data. The last but not least problem was to incorporate the prototype into an existing text editor. How does the system work In order to demonstrate the function of the pivot implementation of our system we decided to connect it to a commercially available text editor. We intended to create a DLL library with the standard grammar checking interface required by a particular text editor. This idea turned out to be unrealistic because the necessary interface is among the classified inside information in most companies. Fortunately there is the possibility to use a concept of Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) for the communication between programs in the Microsoft Windows environment. This type of connection is of course much slower than the intended one, but for the purpose of this demonstration the difference in speed is not so important. Our system can work with any text editor under Windows that contains a macro language supporting the DDE connection. For the purpose of the pivot implementation of the system we have chosen Microsoft Word 6.0. The grammar checker is implemented as an independent Windows application (GRAMMAR.EXE) which runs on the background of the Word. In order to be able to …

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