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Wyświetlanie postów z lipiec, 2009

Evaluating Grammar Checkers

As a developer of LanguageTool, I would love to see clear guidelines for evaluating grammar checkers. Some discussions of flaws in grammar checkers - such as the influential analysis by Daniel Kies - rely on quite controversial principles and make assumptions that seem unwarranted at times. Kies used analysis of a corpus of 3000 college essays in English to evaluate the checkers. Now, the analysis contained top 20 errors, ordered by frequency. Of course, frequency of the error seems to be an important factor but what about the severity of error? Let me explain. I really doubt that "No comma after introductory element" is the top error in college essays if they're written on a computer keyboard. The most common error is to have multiple whitespace or formatting with whitespace. Of course, this is not strictly a grammar error, but punctuation is also quite far from syntactic principles of the language, and multiple whitespace is also a punctuation problem. If they had manu