Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2000 / Developing a grammar checker for Swedish

Developing a grammar checker for Swedish

Summary

The paper describes how the Finnish company Lingsoft built a commercial grammar checker for Swedish in 1997–1999. The product is called Grammatifix. The author briefly reviews earlier attempts at grammar checking for the Scandinavian languages. He then discusses what should count as a grammar checker at all. Such tools cover only a small share of syntactic phenomena, and they also check punctuation, capitalization, number and date formats, and style. The goal was not a prototype but a stable, finished product with deadlines set in advance. The team therefore chose priority error types and carried out thorough functional testing. Errors are detected by rules based on the existing Constraint Grammar technology, specifically its Swedish implementation, SWECG. The formalism had previously been applied to correct sentences; here it was adapted to find incorrect constructions. The checker was built directly into Microsoft Word, so ordinary spelling errors fell outside its scope. The outcome of the work: Grammatifix was included in the Swedish version of Microsoft Office 2000. At the end, the author compares the error types covered with those of two other projects, SCARRIE and Granska.

Key points

  • Microsoft licensed Grammatifix as the grammar component of the Swedish Office 2000, released in 2000. It is also sold as a standalone product.
  • Errors are detected using SWECG (Swedish Constraint Grammar), which Lingsoft developed in-house. For Swedish, the key issue is agreement within the noun phrase. Subject–verb agreement, which is important for English, does not matter here.
  • The checker is integrated through the Microsoft Common Grammar 1.x API (MS-CGAPI). As a result, its feature set is limited to what Word supports. Spelling is checked by a separate Lingsoft spell checker, which was already included in Office 97 SR1.
  • Competitors: Granska (KTH, NADA, since 1994) and SCARRIE (Uppsala University, 1996–1999). Besides Swedish, SCARRIE covers Danish and Norwegian Bokmål. Unlike Grammatifix, both also check spelling.
  • Among the stylistic measures, the LIX readability index is mentioned. It is computed from the average sentence length and the proportion of words longer than seven letters.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{arppe2000developing,
  title = {{Developing a grammar checker for Swedish}},
  author = {Arppe, Antti},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 12th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODALIDA 1999)},
  year = {2000},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W99-1002/}
}

References

9 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Arppe, A; Bim, J; Westerlund, F. 1999. Lingsoft’s Swedish Grammar Checker. http://www.lingsoft.fi/doc/swegc/ ↗
  2. Bemth, A. 1997. EasyEnglish: A Tool for Improving Document Quality. The Proceedings o f the Fifth Conference on Applied Language Processing, Washington, 159-165. Bim, J. (this volume). Detecting grammar errors with Lingsoft’s Swedish grammar checker. find
  3. Bim, J. 1998. Swedish Constraint Grammar: A short presentation, http ://www. lingsoft. fi/doc/swecg/ Bustamante, F. R. & and Léon, F. S. 1996. GramCheck: A Grammar and Style Checker. The Proceedings o f the 16”' International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Copenhagen, 175-181. find
  4. Domeij, R; Knutsson, O; Larsson, S. 1996. Datorstöd for språklig granskning under skrivprocessen: en lägesrapport. Report number IPLab-109. Stockholm: Interaction and Presentation Laboratory, Department of Numerical Analysis and Computer Science, Royal Institute of Technology. find
  5. Domeij, R; Knutsson, O; Larsson, S; Severinsson Eklundh, K; Rex, Å 1998. Granskaprojektet 1996-1997. Report number IPLab-146. Stockholm: Interaction and Presentation Laboratory, Department of Numerical Analysis and Computer Science, Royal Institute of Technology. find
  6. Domeij, R; Knutsson, O. 1998. Granskaprojektet: Rapport från arbetet med granskningsregler och kommentarer. Internal subreport 26.8.1998. Stockholm: Interaction and Presentation Laboratory, Department of Numerical Analysis and Computer Science, Royal Institute of Technology. find
  7. Karlsson, F. 1992. SWETWOL: Comprehensive Morphological Analyzer for Swedish. Nordic Journal o f Linguistics, volume 15, 1992, 1-45. find
  8. Severinsson Eklundh, K. 1993. Skrivprocessen och datom. Contribution to Människor-Datateknik-Arbetsliv (Ed. Lennart Lennerlöf). S^vall Hein, A. 1998. A Chart-Based Framework for Grammar Checking: Initial Studies. Proceedings o f i f ” Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics, Copenhagen, 68-80. find
  9. Uszkoreit, H. 1996. Grammar Checking. Theory, Practice and Lessons learned in LATESLAV. Concluding oral presentation at the final review meeting of the Lateslav Project (PECO 2824), Prague, August 1996. As presented in S^vall Hein, Anna 1998. find

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/arppe-2000-developing-grammar-checker-swedish/