lj@spdcc.COM (Len Jacobs) (01/14/89)
Does anyone have any experience using Houghton Mifflin's text analysis system? Apparently written in C it is presently only available on VMS machines, but soon to be ported more broadly. Supposedly this system has the power of AT&T's Writers Workbench, but is much more compact. (Anyone hear anything lately about WWB?) If you know about Houghton Mifflin's new software, please respond. If you want to be in touch with them, contact Carol Tegen, Houghton Mifflin, 1 Beacon St., Boston, MA 02108. (617) 725-5000. It is called ``CorrecText Grammar Correction System.''
rda@epistemi.ed.ac.uk (Robert Dale) (01/15/89)
In a recent posting to comp.text, lj@spdcc.COM (Len Jacobs) writes ... > Does anyone have any experience using Houghton Mifflin's > text analysis system? Apparently written in C it is presently > only available on VMS machines, but soon to be ported more > broadly. I read some of H-M's promotional bumph for this system around 18 months ago, at which point I suspected no one had used it -- all the "quotes from the great" on the back of the brochure spoke in the future tense, eg "It would be great to have something like this ...". I'd be interested to hear of anyone who has actually used it, or seen it work in real life. > Supposedly this system has the power of AT&T's Writers Workbench, but > is much more compact. (Anyone hear anything lately about WWB?) At least as far as the claims in that brochure were concerned (and it did include pics of the screen, although I suppose they could have been mocked up easily), the system is supposed to be far superior to WWB. WWB -- at least last I heard -- doesn't do any syntactic checking at all, in fact doesn't even have a parts of speech dictionary except for the closed class words and a few others. CorrecText, however, in order to do what is claimed for it, would have to have reasonably sophisticated parsing with a pretty complete dictionary. So, it's more much more comparable to IBM's EPISTLE/CRITIQUE (although I've never spoken to anyone who's actually seen that working in real life either) than to WWB. More vaporware? R -- Robert Dale Phone: +44 31 667 1011 x6470 | University of Edinburgh UUCP: ...!uunet!mcvax!ukc!its63b!epistemi!rda | Centre for Cognitive Science ARPA: rda%epistemi.ed.ac.uk@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk | 2 Buccleuch Place JANET: rda@uk.ac.ed.epistemi | Edinburgh EH8 9LW Scotland