As reported briefly last week (CI No 971), DEC is describing its new VAX Grammar Checker, Nashua, as the first computer-aided proofreading software system to check and correct documents by analysing sentence structure. According to the company, the useful but limited style checkers currently available on the market work by pattern-matching phrases against stored lists and words: Nashua is distinguished by being able to identify grammatical functions and the relationships of words in sentences, which, in turn, enables it to detect a range of grammatical, syntactical and stylistic errors, and – equally significant – suggest alternatives. Overall, users are offered three different levels of error detection; one-line help messages, explanations with examples, and full screen tutorials. DEC cites the example of the sentence The man works to much as one which standard spelling checkers would overlook; the VAX Grammar Checker, reading the word in context, would offer too as an alternative, and allow the user to make the necessary change with a single keystroke. The checker also picks up the kind of mistakes frequently found in electronically generated documents – deletions, insertions and mistakes produced at a later stage in a sentence by replacing a verb or phrase. Based on the CorrecText Grammar Correction System, licensed to DEC by Houghton Mifflin, the checker contains a dictionary of 135,000 words; by storing the liguistic information using data compression methods, DEC claims that an average sentence is checked in about one second. Pricing and availability for the checker, designed to run in any VAX/VMS environment, will be announced next month; the company also plans to offer it as an option with Version 3.0 of the WPS-PLUS/VMS word processing software.
