Sourceforge Project Application
by Yusuke Shinyama, May 28, 2003

Our goal is to provide a free grammar checker for non-native
English speakers. For non-native speakers, it is not easy sometime
to recognize certain syntactic properties in English sentences
such as number agreement, which is fairly easy to recognize for
native speakers. So automated checking of this kind of simple
errors is useful for non-natives who need to write papers or
reports in English.

The program analyze input sentences in several stages and check if
the sentences satisfied some constraints.  The overall structure
of the software consists of several parts: Preprocessor (stripping
HTML or TeX), English sentence recognizer, Part-Of-Speech tagger,
Phrase recognizer (or Chunker), and Constraint checker.  The main
program will be written in Python.

Due to its nature, the software need to have some knowledge for
processing natural language sentences. In particular, an English
dictionary is indispensable. We are planning to use WordNet, an
electronic dictionary developped in Princeton University, which
can be freely distributed. Although we are going to distribute a
program only, users will be required to obtain that package
themselves.