Project and implementation of an automatic grammar reviser for the Portuguese language

• Grant number: 97/02608-1
• Support type: Research Grants - Research Partnership for Technological Innovation - PITE
• Duration: October 01, 1997 - October 31, 1998
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Computer Science
• Principal Investigator: Maria das Graças Volpe Nunes
• Grantee: Maria das Graças Volpe Nunes
• Home Institution: Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação (ICMC). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Company: Itautec Philco S/A
• City: São Carlos

Abstract

The research aimed to carry out studies in computational linguistics for the production of a new version of Itautec-Philco S/A’s Grammatical Reviser, which is now on the market. The original version, which included automatic syntactic analysis and corrected several kinds of errors, was perfected, following the creation of rules to avoid lexical ambiguities and ambiguities in syntactical structures. In order to do this, studies were undertaken of the written Portuguese language in a corpus (a body of texts) of over 35 million words. Besides serving for the creation of the rules, the study of the corpus made it possible to extend the process of identifying the errors frequently committed by users of secondary school level, making the Grammatical Reviser suitable for its target public, namely secretaries and office workers in general. In this new version, the Grammatical Reviser works coupled with an online grammar, which supplies contextualized grammatical assistance, based on the difficulties identified in the correction of the text by the user himself. The implementation of the online grammar was an important part of the project. The work was carried out with the support of a multidisciplinary team of linguists, and computing professionals who were already working in collaboration. (AU)