[Project-ideas] Enhancing the grammar checker

[Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay]

Hi Aditi,

I did put in a brief comment on Melange, I'll try and elaborate here.

On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 1:11 AM, Aditi Bhatnagar
<aditi24.bhatnagar at gmail.com> wrote:
> Most of the people, when they write any document wants it to be
> grammatically error proof. Grammatical errors leave a negative  impact about
> the sender on the reader of the document. Thus users really desire that
> there should be some mechanism so that their grammatical mistakes are
> identified and corrected.

I agree with the above statement(s). Grammar-checks, spelling checks
and thesaurus based correction are input aids that have existing for
long in non Indic languages. Indic languages are catching up but there
is still a qualitative gap if one uses the performance of non Indic
language aids as a baseline.

> Though Libre Office has incorporated grammar checks, these are ineffective
> and check basic mistakes viz repetition of words etc, it is unable to check
> correct usage of tenses, verbs etc.Since grammar of a language is something
> that is well defined, the grammatical concepts can be coded so as to reduce
> human efforts to identify mistakes.

LibreOffice.org has inherited the checks from OpenOffice.org and, in
turn, OO.o use checkers which were devised for generic usage across
text editors and so forth. Compared to the non Indic checkers, the
issue with the LibO.o libraries and files for Indic language is that
there is not much by the way of user-driven improvement. Which in turn
means that it depends on the maintainer of the file and the language
communities to keep updating them with the correct spelling(s) as well
as keep the grammar rules updated.

Spellings is an absolutely annoying problem because new words are
hardly added to the files. Kushal Das had an interesting idea about
running a light web-based service which will scrape/parse a few known
sites with Bengali content and, keep adding the unique words as well
as highlight the spelling variants. The intent was to keep augmenting
the words in the language dictionary which can then be used with
grammar rules to be useful aids. Additionally, this would also help in
a very small way with any machine-translation efforts.

> What I specifically wish to do is to add a new button to libre office named
> grammar checker, whenever the user clicks on that, the grammatically correct
> copy of the selected text is generated.
> I don't wish to keep it as an auto-correct option since high sensitivity of
> grammar checks has always been a problem and can irritate the  user. So
> whenever user feels like rectifying the document , he/she will click on the
> button.

I would suggest that you consider it as an extension
(<http://extensions.libreoffice.org/>) - your idea provides
functionality over and above what the stock writing aids offer in
LibO.o This should allow you to get more users to test the concept
(I'd be happy to be the first in line) and, also to visualize the
framework wherein the extension could taken in specific language
checks or, language pairs.

/sankarshan



--
sankarshan mukhopadhyay
<https://twitter.com/#!/sankarshan>