Parse Fitting and Prose Fixing

Abstract

Processing syntactically ill-formed language is an important mission of a text-critiquing system. This chapter discusses how ill-formed input is treated by Epistle, the forerunner of Critique. Misspellings are highlighted by a standard spelling checker; syntactic errors are detected and corrections are suggested; and stylistic infelicities are called to the user’s attention. Central to the processing strategy is the technique of fitted parsing. When the rules of a conventional syntactic grammar are unable to produce a parse for an input string, this technique can be used to produce a reasonable approximate parse that can serve as input to the remaining stages of processing.

This chapter describes the fitting process and gives examples of ill-formed language situations where it is called into play. It also shows how a fitted parse allows the system to carry on its text-critiquing mission where conventional grammars would fail either because of input problems or because of limitations in the grammars themselves.