French Grammar Checker Wars

Will an ambitious new package from Quebec usher in a new generation of French writing tools and ravage the competition?

Montreal software house Machina Sapiens has launched a new French grammar-checker, Exploratexte, which Claude Coulombes, vice president for r&d, says is the result of ”the most ambitious r&d project ever undertaken by a private company in Quebec.” Machina Sapiens is convinced its package is ”the best French grammar corrector on the market,” pointing to glowing benchtest results published by a French computer magazine in 1990. A Mac version is currently available; ms-dos and Windows versions are due shortly.
    Competition is thriving in the market for French language writing aids, with Hugo Plus, Sans Faute, GramR, and Grammatik for French currently available and a new WinSoft Mac product on the horizon, courtesy of Cap Gemini Innovation’s Corwin system. Up to now, the French have conspicuously allowed their North American cousins do the lion’s share of the work in developing such software for the general wordprocessing public.
    Machina Sapiens presents Exploratexte as a sort of expert system aimed at the educational market, perhaps partly due to the Quebec Education Ministry’s support for the project. This means, on the one hand, that much attention has been paid to the user interface and, on the other, that the system contains a large amount of morphological, grammatical, and lexical information related to helping language learners. Plenty of class-room interactivity, in other words, rather than a tool for heavy-duty writers.
    Claude Coulombes reckons his system prefigures what he calls the ”third generation” of writing aids, succeeding the early word-based spell-checkers and the current generation of local syntax grammar checkers, which, in the case of French, handle such features as nominal group agreement, but no more. He claims Exploratexte offers global sentence handling for an interesting subset of French grammatical structures by virtue of a large rule base (nine thousand quoted to LIM in Paris last November). No doubt some kind of semantic processing at the discourse level will be required for a genuinely global approach to sentence handling in the future.
    Machina Sapiens is banking on a return for its investments in Exploratexte within two years. It reckons that home-base Quebec should be good for 50,000 copies and Europe good for 250,000 copies of a high-performance French grammar-checker per year. Will this be the case? The company will soon find out. Sapiens nihil afirmat quod non probet.

Machina Sapiens, Inc. 5780 ave. Decelles, b. 314, Montreal, Quebec H3S 2C7, Canada Tel +1 514 733 1095, Fax +1 514 733 2774