La Correcteur

Montreal software house Machina Sapiens has launched an ambitious grammarchecker for French based on Exploratexte, a package for learning French that the company developed in collaboration with the Quebec Ministry of Education. The grammar checker has been dubbed La Correcteur 101, in honor of Bill 101, the law that protects “the vitality” of the French language in Quebec. La Correcteur 101 likewise serves as a “guardian of quality in written French,’ as Machina Sapiens so nobl y expresses it.
    Machina Sapiens claims that what sets 101 apart is that it performs “complete grammatical analyses” of even complex French sentences. Based on Maurice Grevisse’s Le Bon usage, the system contains upwards of 3,000 syntax rules and in excess of 300 agreement rules, and employs a base lexicon of 60,000 entries. 101, which recognizes more than 1,500 specific pitfalls in the French language, is available in both Mac and Windows versions.
    Also under development at Machina Sapiens is an information retrieval tool dubbed InfoScan, which will enable users to make full-text searches using Boolean operators, wild cards, and both phonetic and fuzzy searches in English, French, and Spanish texts. Once documents have been processed, InfoScan will generate relevancy rankings on the basis of a user’s interests. Machina Sapiens sees lots of interesting commercial applications for InfoScan; internet news scanning, email filtering, and video and multimedia document retrieval on large public networks.

Machina Sapiens, Lacombe Avenue, Montreal, Quebec, H3T lL7, Canada; Tel: + 1 514 733 1095, Fax: + 1 514 733 2774, Email: machina@immedia.ca