Grammar checking in 2018
I am a big fan of using tools to find problems quickly. Polishing the draft material for my evidence-based software engineering book, I have been finding an annoying number of grammatical mistakes :-(.
LanguageTool is what I use to check my grammar; it is the best tool of its kind that I know, and supports lots of different languages.
I also have an awk script that looks for new instances of previous mistakes I have made. It rarely flags anything, I seem to be in a continual state of making new grammatical mistakes.
Stung by a recent series is blatant mistakes, I have been searching for a better tool. What did I find:
- The 2014 Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning shared task was grammatical error correction,
- a bibliography of papers on grammatical error correction,
- LMGEC-Lite: the latest research tool (I will download the Billion Word Benchmark dataset, to build the 4G training dataset, from which the 10G language model is created, another day),
- a machine translation approach that automates grammatical error correction, i.e., rewrites what has been written. Perhaps I should use this tool on some of the software engineering papers I read, it could not make them any worse.
So, lots of interesting stuff, but nothing better that is usable.
I keep looking at the interesting things that spaCY can do (if you are looking to integrate language processing in your app, spaCY is currently the best language processing library). Does anybody know of grammar checking work being done using spaCY (LanguageTool is based around a parsing engine that is rather long in the tooth now)?
Anybody interested in organizing a grammar checking tool hack day in London?
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