The development and performance of a grammar checker for Swedish : A language engineering perspective

Abstract

This article describes the construction and performance of Granska – a surface-oriented system for grammar checking of Swedish text. With the use of carefully constructed error detection rules, written in a new structured rule language, the system can detect and suggest corrections for a number of grammatical errors in Swedish texts. In this article, we specifically focus on how erroneously split compounds and disagreement are handled in the rules. The system combines probabilistic and rule-based methods to achieve high efficiency and robustness. The error detection rules are optimized using statistics of part-of-speech bigrams and words in a way that each rule needs to be checked as seldom as possible. We have found that the Granska system with higher efficiency can achieve the same or better results than systems with conventional technology.