kadie@uiucdcsb.cs.uiuc.edu (01/21/88)
Remember last year's heated discussion about grammar and
style checkers? Well here is a little data (some few data?).
I recently had a 13 page double-spaced document proof read
by a person (my advisor). He suggested about 22 simple grammar corrections;
I made every correction. Then I feed the same document to RIGHTWRITER
a commercial program for the IBM AT. It make 159 suggestions;
I took 9 of them. The person and the program make one identical
suggestion.
So:
* Humans are much better proofreaders than (today's) programs.
* Program might still be worth using since they may find errors
that a human misses and since they are convenient.
Also:
The most important comments a human makes are about the understandability
of the document. In a sense the human is telling how well
the document "executes." Since, the program only looks a syntax,
it can only guess about this part.
Carl Kadie
Inductive Learning Group
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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