Lingsoft’s Swedish Grammar Checker

The Swedish Grammar Checker by Lingsoft, delivered as part of MS Office since 1999, is built using Constraint Grammar (CG1). Below are a couple of screen shots illustrating how the grammar checker allerts and informs the user of some common error types.

Definitness error

The following sentence contains a definitness error:

And this is how the error is classified and reported to the user when right clicked. The menu also contains a correction suggestion:

Note how the erroneous word itself (slutsatsen) is used in the feedback, as well as the word that gives the syntactic context that triggers the error (Naturvårdsverkets). Note also that the triggering word is not the immediately preceeding word.

If one selects the menu entry Grammatikk… in the context menu, one is presented with the following:

Gender congruency error

The second error example is one where a modifier (utökat, a participle) of a noun (vargpopulation) is not inflected for the gender of the noun:

Again, the context menu gives a lot of information about the error, using the actual words in the sentence to refer to the error.

If one selects the Grammatikk… option in the context menu, one gets the following:

Ideally, we want to do something similar in our grammar checker, but limitations in the host application and its grammar checker API may force us to do something less advanced.

Settings

The grammar checker comes with a number of premade settings, bundled together in suitable style options (screen shots shown are from MS Office 2013):

If one clicks on the Innstillinger… button, one can fine-tune the different settings, or make one own’s unique grammar checker style:

The Lingsoft grammar checker in Word has 41 error categories that one can turn on or off.