RightWriter: State of the Art?

Grammar checkers are now incorporated into popular wordprocessors such as Word for Windows and WordPerfect for Windows 5.2. They are gaining credibility. Are they also getting better? A look at version 7 of RightWriter.

Que Software is now shipping a Windows version of its popular program RightWriter, “the intelligent grammar and style checker”. Taking advantage of that graphic environment, version 6 of RightWriter has a Grammar Equalizer. This is a set of sliders modeled after the graphic equalizers found on audio equipment and it enables you to adjust RightWriter’s coverage, no doubt enabling you to obtain the linguistic equivalent of mega-bass in your prose style. Other more conventionally styled menus give more specific control over RightWriter by allowing you to switch specific rules on and off.
    Que is proud of RightWriter’s large (±6,500) “rule base,” but if its rules do not go far enough, you can add your own using RightWriter’s Edit Language Rules command. The “rules” you can add, however, are limited to literal words and phrases. As such, it is a rather loose interpretation of the term. To “edit a rule,” you enter a word or phrase, indicate what category of “rule” it is, and set a true or false flag. Here and in other places, RightWriter’s authors and promoters display a rather flexible attitude to terminology.
    Away from the hyperbole found on the program’s packaging, Que clearly states in the manual: “RightWriter is not a full natural-language system; RightWriter is a very good grammar and style checker that analyzes the syntax, or structure, of sentences.” If the first statement is true, how accurate a claim is the second?

Show us a parse tree
RightWriter has a Parse Tree window; it allows you to see how the program has parsed a sentence. Perhaps it is intended as an education tool; in any case, it is a useful way of taking a look under RightWriter’s hood. Including the Parse Tree window was a brave DECision on the part of RightWriter’s authors. RightWriter’s parse trees shows that the program does try to classify or tag all the words in a sentence, although it covers itself sometimes by indicating all the possibilities (i.e., “adjective, adverb or preposition”). It also tries to group words into constituents, such as noun and verb phrases. It will further recognize certain constructions, such as dependent and conditional clauses. It does not go any deeper, however, and this severely hampers its effectiveness.
    Letting RightWriter loose on a simple test file reveals some of the capabilities and the limitations of its syntactic analysis. In the sentence The books belongs to me, RighterWriter rightly perceives an agreement error. However, it is not bothered by These book belongs to me nor Where, I asked, is the tests? The program cannot determine whether a sentence lacks a main clause. Nor can it maintain its analysis across discontinuous elements, such as in: The book, it seems, are ready. Even when it tries to be helpful, it can be wrong: analyzing the sentence For the reasons I outlined above, I am resigning, RightWriter asks whether there is a comma missing between reasons and I. A quick look at the Parse Tree window reveals that RightWriter perceives the prepositional phrase as For the reasons.
    If you regard RightWriter as grammar checker and use it as such, you do so at your own risk: the program cannot offer any assurance that a text it has proofed contains no grammatical errors. It seems unfair, however, simply to dismiss it like that. What would happen if we regarded RightWriter as a “smart spellchecker” instead? By tinkering with some of the language rules, such as stopping it from flagging passives and “complex” sentences with more than two phrases, among other stylistic interference, RightWriter can be transformed into a useful proofing tool. It flags such things as hyphenated adverbs (“rapidly- seen”), punctuation errors (“,) and closed spelling problems (“nonstandard”) that the usual spellcheckers miss.
    Suppose you have been working on Eurotra for the past ten years, times are lean, and you are looking for something else to do with your talents. How about writing a grammar checker? You can surely do better than Reference Software, Houghton Mifflin, or Que — Easy! You port your parser to C, optimize it so that it takes five seconds to parse a sentence instead of two minutes, and — Voil…! — you now have a grammar checker that can run rings around RightWriter.
    That might be true. Que, however, has some natural advantages. It has introduced Macintosh, Windows, and Unix versions of RightWriter and sold many hundreds of thousands of copies of the package. It has an aggressive marketing strategy, a solid distribution network, and a large and powerful corporation behind it. It also has a user base (reputedly 750,000) buying upgrades and requesting specific improvements. That is something you cannot hope to match. Still, Que faces some choices – and some competition. It can follow Reference Software’s example and hire computational linguists like yourself to completely rewrite the software. That could take a couple of years and some substantial funding. Or Que can allow the revenues from the package to dissipate within the Paramount- Macmillan-Prentice Hall corporate structure, thereby dooming the package to oblivion. One thing is certain: if Que does not want to advance the state of the art, Reference seems willing to do so; maybe Microsoft and Oracle as well.

Que Software, 11711 N. College Ave., Carmel, IN 46032, USA, Tel +1 317 573 2500, Fax +1 317 573 2645