Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!aimmi.UUCP!gilbert From: gilbert@aimmi.UUCP.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest Subject: Grammar Checkers Message-ID: <14@aimmi.UUCP> Date: Sat, 9-May-87 14:17:44 EDT Article-I.D.: aimmi.14 Posted: Sat May 9 14:17:44 1987 Date-Received: Thu, 14-May-87 05:56:05 EDT References: Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: aimmi!gilbert (Gilbert Cockton) Distribution: world Organization: Heriot-Watt/Strathclyde Alvey MMI Unit, Scotland Lines: 97 Approved: ailist@stripe.sri.com In article MINSKY@OZ.AI.MIT.EDU writes: >I agree with Todd, Ogasawara: one should not criticise to extremes. What does this mean? I thought accuracy was the only goal in criticism, not avoiding the ends of some quaint invented continuum. Can we have a style checker which rates our extremity with marks out of 10 (0 for credulous and 10 for rampant scepticism perhaps :-)) > I also used it to establish a "gradient". The early >chapters are written at a "grade level" of about 8.6 and the book ends >up with grade levels more like 13.2 - using RightWriter's quaint >scale. How about MIT turning some of its resources towards VALIDATING this quaint gradient? Do you seriously think there is any real computable ordering, partial or otherwise, which can be applied to your chapters and actually square up with any of our everyday evaluations of text complexity? If so, where's the beef? How would US data square up with European data. English teachers in the UK, for example, do not apply unimaginative inflexible rules to students' writing, so it could be that many educated English students will be turned off by an 8.6 introduction. Luckily we have not yet been carried away with the belief that all complex ideas can have banal presentations without bowdlerisation creeping in. Doubtless your style checker would ask me to drop 'bowdlerise'? What should I have used instead, given that I want an EXACT synonym with all its connotations? When I taught, I would have advised my students to find a dictionary (many of them carried them anyway - and I taught children from a wide range of cultural and economic backgrounds). God knows what the French would say to a mechanical style checker (a Franglais remover would go down well though). Finally, how on earth do these style checkers know which words will be commonly understood? Surely they don't use word frequency in newspapers or something like that? Does the overuse of a word in the media imply universal understanding of/consensus on its meaning - eg. 'moral', 'freedom', 'extreme', 'quaint', 'seriously', 'inflexible' etc? Does the limited use of a word in the media imply universal ignorance - eg. 'ok', 'alright', 'balls', 'claptrap', 'space cadet', 'avid', 'stroppy', 'automaton'? I would not regard any of the criticisms of style checkers I have read as 'extreme' at all. The difference seems to be one of gross credulity versus informed criticism. People who know nothing about good style will believe all the things which the style checker hackers have MADE UP - I defy any style checker implementor to point to a sound experimental/statistical basis for the style rules they have palmed off onto their gullible customers. Perhaps they did at least read some books by self-proclaimed authorities, but this would only shift the charge from invention to uncritical acceptance. I'd still be unimpressed. This may sound extreme - that however is irrelevant. The point is, am I accurate?. Note that my substantial assertions are few: i) Style don't compute. Verify by Chinese characters test between a style checker and the editors of the New Yorker (US) or the Listener (UK). Other quality magazine editors will do. Can you spot the editors' critiques? ii) The current 'reading age' metrics have no validity. They are bogus psychometric tools. Operationally I am saying that their will be no strong correlation (say r > 0.9, p < 0.001) between the reading age of text and a reader's performance on a comprehension test. Allow the author to add a glossary and the correlation will weaken. People can learn new words you know. iii) Current measures of popular understanding of words are equally bogus and there is NO decent research to back it up. There has been some good work on correlating vocabulary with educational achievement, but this tells us nothing about the typical adult's vocabulary. Every assertion above is falsifiable, so let's all forget about emotive subjective concepts like extremity (= I disagree a lot and wish you hadn't said that) and get back to an objective, informed debate. The motion is: "All computer based style checkers can stunt the literary growth of their users" A second order effect is that, although 1,000 chimpanzees could between them type out the works of Shakespeare given enough time, they would fail miserably if their output had to be passed by a computer style checker. To be, or not to be, that is the question. >> Sentence starts with infinitive Sentence has no subject. Whether it is .... >> "Whether" may not be understood by people who just read comics. (? spelling mistake = weather ?). -- Gilbert Cockton, Scottish HCI Centre, Ben Line Building, Edinburgh, EH1 1TN JANET: gilbert@uk.ac.hw.aimmi ARPA: gilbert%aimmi.hw.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk UUCP: ..!{backbone}!aimmi.hw.ac.uk!gilbert