GramCheck: A Grammar and Style Checker

GramCheck: A Grammar and Style Checker Flora Ramlrez Bustamante Escuela Politdcnica SuI)erior Universidad Carh)s lll de Madrid C/ l]utaI'qU(~ i[5 28011 Legands, Madrid, SPAIN flora@ia, uc3m. es Fernando S&nchez Le6n Laboratorio de I,ingiifstica InformStica Facultad de Filosoffa y Letras Universidad Autdnoma de Madrid 28049 Madrid, SPAIN fernando@maria, lllf. uam. es Abstract This paper presents a gratmnar and style checker demonstrator for Span- ish and Greek native writers devel- oped within the project GramCheck. Besides a brief grmnmar error typol- ogy for Spanish, a linguistically moti- vated approach to detection and diag- nosis is presented, based on the gen- eralized use of PROLOG extensions to highly typed unification-based gram- mars. The demonstrator, currently in- cluding flfll coverage for agreement er- rors and certain head-argmnent relation issues, also provides correction by means of an analysis-transfer-synthesis cycle. Finally, fltture extensions to the (:urrent system are discussed. 1 Introduction Grammar checking stelnmed as a logical appli- cation from forlner attelni)ts to natural language. ulMerstanding by comtmters. Many of the NLU systems developed in the 70's indu(le(l a kind of error recovery Inechanisln ranging flom the treat- ment only of spelling e.rrors, PARRY (1)arkin - son c't al., 1977), to tile inclusion also of incom- plete int)ut containing some kind of ellipsis, LAD- DEll,/LIFEll (Hendrix et al., 1977). The interest in the 80's begun to turn consid- ering grammar checking as an enterprise of its own right (Carbonell & Hayes, 1983), (Ilayes & Mouradian, 1981), (Heidorn et al., 1982), (.lensen at al., 1983), though many of the approaches were still in I;t1(: NLU tradition ((]harniak, 198a), (Granger, 1983), (Kwasny & Sondheimer, 1981), (Weischedel & Black, ]980), (Weisehedel & Sond- heimer, 1983). A 1985 Ovum report on nal;ll- ral language applications (.lohnson, 1985) already identifies grammar and style checking as one of the seven major apt)lications of NLP. Currently, every project in grammar checking has as its goal the creation of a writing aid rather than a robust man-machine interface (Adriaens, 1994), (llolioli ctal., 1992), (Vosse, 1992). Current systems dealillg with grammatical de- viance have be(m inainly involve(t in the integi~> don of special techniques to detect and correct, when possible, these, deviances. In some case.s, these have be.en incorporated to traditional pars- ing techniques, as it is the case with feature re- laxation in the context of unification-based for- malisms (Bolioli et al., 1992), or the addition of a set of catching error rules si)ecially handling the deviant constructions (Thurlnair, 1990). In other eases, the relaxation component has heen included as a new add-in feature to the parsing algoril,hm, as in the IBM's PLNLI' aI)proach (Heidorn et al., 1982), or in the work developed for tim Tra.nsla- tor's Workbench t)roject using the METAL MT- system (TWB, 1992). Besides, an increasing concern in current projects is that of linguistic relevance of the anal- ysis t)erformed by the grammar correction system. In this sense, the adequate integration of error detection and correction techniques within main- stream grammm" formalisms has l)een addressed by a nunl|)er of these projects …

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