Media: A Word to the unwise -- program's grammar check isn't so smart
| Submitter: |
John Lawler
|
| Submitter Email: | jlawler@umich.edu |
| Linguistic Field(s): |
Computational Linguistics General Linguistics |
| Media Body: |
Sandeep Krishnamurthy, a business professor at the University of Washington, recently discovered to his horror that the Grammar Checker in MicroSoft Word actually countenances terribly ungrammatical sentences. He is protesting loudly. People everywhere are shocked, shocked. The story has been picked up by NPR and others; the URL below is an article from Monday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer that gets into the issues thoroughly, with several computational linguists interviewed. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/217802_grammar28.asp This article is in the Business section, somewhat unusually for LINGUIST Media sightings. I see three points in it that I think are of interest to linguists worldwide. First, we could all use a better grammar-checker program, and the ultimate intent of the 'crusade' is to stimulate linguistic research and development, so this seems like good news for linguists and linguistics, which is fairly unusual here as well. Second, we can see from the surprise being shown by the American public and the media that everybody actually *did* expect the MS Grammar Checker to (ahem) 'Check Grammar'. This endemic ignorance is emphatically *not* good news for linguists or linguistics. It's downright appalling. Third, how come it's a business professor instead of a linguist? -John Lawler U of Michigan Linguistics Dept http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/disclaimers.html #include disclaimers.h |
| Issue Number: | 16.961 |
| Date Posted: | March 29, 2005 |
