Is it possible to do grammar checking within emacs?

Is it possible to do grammar checking within emacs?

[xz]

Yes, I know it can check the spelling. But what about grammar?

If this is possible through emacs, How well does it work, compared
with MS word, which is the only software I know that can do grammar
checking?

Re: Is it possible to do grammar checking within emacs?

[xz]

On Oct 16, 10:52 am, xz <zhang.xi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, I know it can check the spelling. But what about grammar?
>
> If this is possible through emacs, How well does it work, compared
> with MS word, which is the only software I know that can do grammar
> checking?

anybody gives an idea?

Re: Is it possible to do grammar checking within emacs?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: xz <zhang.xi.cn@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2007 23:20:30 -0000
> 
> On Oct 16, 10:52 am, xz <zhang.xi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Yes, I know it can check the spelling. But what about grammar?
> >
> > If this is possible through emacs, How well does it work, compared
> > with MS word, which is the only software I know that can do grammar
> > checking?
> 
> anybody gives an idea?

There just aren't good solutions to this problem.

This page:

   http://faculty.washington.edu/sandeep/check/

will explain why you shouldn't treat the MS Word grammar checker as a
standard of quality.  Try the demo files you find there, and you will
see how miserably Word fails to find even the most trivial mistakes of
English usage.

After searching the net and reading a few papers by specialists in
this area, my conclusion was that the state of the art of the current
technology is simply not good enough for solving this problem in a
satisfactory manner.  The best solutions nowadays rely on data bases
that hold patterns of known abuses of a language and search for those
patterns in the text.  So don't expect too much from the few solutions
I suggest below.

One program that is free software is `diction' (you can find it on GNU
ftp servers); there's diction.el that provides a rather simple Emacs
front end to it.

There's also style-checker
(http://www.cs.umd.edu/~nspring/software/style-check-readme.html),
which is written in Ruby; I'm not aware of any Emacs feature that uses
it, but it shouldn't be hard to write one, or maybe write an Elisp
style checker that just uses the data base which comes with this
package.

Yet another tool is grac (http://grac.sourceforge.net/).  Again, I
don't know about any Emacs interfaces to it.

HTH

Re: Is it possible to do grammar checking within emacs?

[xz]

On Oct 19, 6:07 am, Eli Zaretskii <e...@gnu.org> wrote:
> > From: xz <zhang.xi...@gmail.com>
> > Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2007 23:20:30 -0000
>
> > On Oct 16, 10:52 am, xz <zhang.xi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Yes, I know it can check the spelling. But what about grammar?
>
> > > If this is possible through emacs, How well does it work, compared
> > > with MS word, which is the only software I know that can do grammar
> > > checking?
>
> > anybody gives an idea?
>
> There just aren't good solutions to this problem.
>
> This page:
>
>    http://faculty.washington.edu/sandeep/check/
>
> will explain why you shouldn't treat the MS Word grammar checker as a
> standard of quality.  Try the demo files you find there, and you will
> see how miserably Word fails to find even the most trivial mistakes of
> English usage.
>
> After searching the net and reading a few papers by specialists in
> this area, my conclusion was that the state of the art of the current
> technology is simply not good enough for solving this problem in a
> satisfactory manner.  The best solutions nowadays rely on data bases
> that hold patterns of known abuses of a language and search for those
> patterns in the text.  So don't expect too much from the few solutions
> I suggest below.
>
> One program that is free software is `diction' (you can find it on GNU
> ftp servers); there's diction.el that provides a rather simple Emacs
> front end to it.
>
> There's also style-checker
> (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~nspring/software/style-check-readme.html),
> which is written in Ruby; I'm not aware of any Emacs feature that uses
> it, but it shouldn't be hard to write one, or maybe write an Elisp
> style checker that just uses the data base which comes with this
> package.
>
> Yet another tool is grac (http://grac.sourceforge.net/).  Again, I
> don't know about any Emacs interfaces to it.
>
> HTH

well, still thank  you for telling me that.

Re: Is it possible to do grammar checking within emacs?

[gnuist006]

On Oct 19, 4:07 am, Eli Zaretskii <e...@gnu.org> wrote:

> After searching the net and reading a few papers by specialists in
> this area,

Which papers Eli ? plz give a link or ref, and if you have a little
time, a little summary of the main conclusions.

Thanks a lot for helping out the people.

Gnuist

Re: Is it possible to do grammar checking within emacs?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: gnuist006@gmail.com
> Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2007 20:33:18 -0000
> 
> On Oct 19, 4:07 am, Eli Zaretskii <e...@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> > After searching the net and reading a few papers by specialists in
> > this area,
> 
> Which papers Eli ? plz give a link or ref

I just googled the net for "grammar check software" or some such, and
also used the links on the page I cited:

   http://faculty.washington.edu/sandeep/check/

> and if you have a little time, a little summary of the main
> conclusions.

But I did just that, in my original message: the main conclusion is
that the state of the art of the current technology does not allow to
write efficient grammar checkers.  All that can be done is have a
database of patterns of incorrect usage and scan text for these
patterns.