JED%SU-AI@sri-unix.UUCP (08/01/83)
From: Jim Davidson <JED@SU-AI>
There's a lot of exaggeration here, presumably by the author of the
Sun-Times article. EPISTLE is a legitimate project being worked on
at Yorktown, by George Heidorn, Karen Jensen, and others. [See,
e.g., "The EPISTLE text-critiquing system". Heidorn et al, IBM
Systems Journal, 1982] Its general domain, as indicated, is business
correspondence. Its stated (long-term) goals are
(a) to provide support for the authors of business letters--
critiquing grammar and style, etc.;
(b) to deal with incoming texts: "synopsizing letter contents,
highlighting portions known to be of interest, and
automatically generating index terms based on conceptual
or thematic characteristics rather than key words".
Note that part (b) is stated considerably less ambitiously than in
the Sun-Times article.
The current (as of 1982) version of the system doesn't approach even
these more modest goals. It works only on problems in class (a)--
critiquing drafts of business letters. The *only* things it checks
for are grammar (number agreement, pronoun agreement, etc.), and
style (overly complex sentences, inappropriate vocabulary, etc.)
Even within these areas, it's still very much an experimental system,
and has a long way to go.
Note in particular that the concept of "style" is far short of the
sort of thing presented in the Sun-Times article. The kind of style
checking they're dealing with is the sort of thing you find in a
style manual: passive vs. active voice, too many dependent clauses,
etc.