Developing a grammar checker for Swedish
Antti Arppe · DSpace repository (University of Tartu) · 2000
A grammar checker for Swedish, launched on the market as Grammatifix, has been developed at Lingsoft in 1997-1999.This paper gives first a brief background of grammar checking projects for the Nordic languages, with an emphasis on Swedish.Then, the concept and definition of a grammar checker in general is discussed, followed by an overview of the starting points and limitations that Lingsoft had in setting up the Grammatifix development project.After this, the initial product development process is described, leading to an overview of the error types covered presently by Grammatifix.The error treatment scheme in Grammatifix is presented, with a focus on its relationship with the error detection rules.Finally, the error types included in Grammatifix are compared to those of two other known projects, namely SCARRIE and Granska.In the case of Swedish, some level of checking of noun phrase internal agreement, based on shallow parsing, was incorporated into the Swedish version of the former Inso's International ProofReader proofing tools software, developed in cooperation with IBM in the early 1990's.^Nevertheless, it was not until the middle 1990's that several independent projects were initiated, more or less within the same timeframe, with the intent of developing a full-fledged grammar checker for Swedish, namely Granska, SCARRIE, and Grammatifix.The Granska project was originally initiated in 1994 at the Department of Numerical Analysis and Computer Science (NADA) at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, and has been continued on several occasions (Domeij et al 1996(Domeij et al , 1998)).The SCARRIE project ,which in addition to Swedish also aimed at covering the two other main written Scandinavian languages, Danish, and Norwegian Bokmål, was started in 1996, and was scheduled to end in 1999.In the SCARRIE project, the main responsibility for the Swedish component was undertaken by the Department of Linguistics at the University of Uppsala (Sågvall Hein 1998).Grammatifix is the result of a product development project initiated in 1997 and completed in 1999 at Lingsoft, Inc., a Finnish language engineering company .Lingsoft has licensed Grammatifix to Microsoft as the grammar checking component of the Swedish version of Microsoft Office 2000, launched on the market in the year 2000, and has also released Grammatifix on the Swedish market as a stand-alone product under the Grammatifix brand name.Actually, there is a fourth Swedish proofing tool on the market that covers some error types traditionally associated with grammar checkers, namely Norstedts'