![]() In one exercise, Perelman plugged 5,000 words of a famous Noam Chomsky essay into the e-rater scoring engine by ETS, the company that produces (and grades) the GRE and TOEFL exams. And even worse, they often flagged perfectly good prose as a mistake, known as a false positive. Citing previous research, he found that grammar checkers only correctly identified errors in student papers 50 percent of the time. Perelman has a beef with grammar checkers, which he claims simply do not work. ![]() You can train the machine for a specific situation, but when you talk about transactions in human language, there's actually a huge number of inferences like that going on all the time." "When I make a statement, I believe that you know what I know about this. "So much of English grammar involves inference and something called mutual contextual beliefs," says Perelman. Simple mistake, you might say, but look what happens when I change the sentence to "The car was parked by the curb." Word underlines it and suggests: "The curb parked the car." That's downright goofy, even for a computer. ![]() When I type this sentence into Word, the program dutifully underlines it in green and suggests: "John parked the car." That would be fine if John had parked the car, but what if I meant that the car was physically parked near John? My admittedly dated version of Microsoft Word (Word for Mac 2011) is programmed to recognize and correct passive voice, a no-no in most grammar circles.
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