3 ms·

I don't get what syntax control is. Is it just a count of different grammatical categories? Does it do some kind of sentiment analysis and tell you if your sent

by daemonk 13y ago

I don't get what syntax control is. Is it just a count of different grammatical categories? Does it do some kind of sentiment analysis and tell you if your sentence structure is aggressive or something?

chime 13y ago
As I understood from the original blog post, it identifies bad syntax more easily, enabling you to correct them. In programming terms, it would be a macro that finds code smells and lets you refactor easily. The example he gave was identifying excessive adjective use. Imaging writing a 100+ page document and doing Menu > Syntax Control > Adjectives and seeing all the places where you use unnecessary adjectives. Or really long, run-on sentences. Or extra semicolons. These may be correct grammatically but they might lower readability so you want to minimize their use. I could be wrong but I think this is what they meant by Syntax Control - ability to detect syntax use in English and not highlight/fading text color. If it is the former, I can absolutely see why it took four years to create.
- coldtea 13y ago
  Actually you're overthinking it. It's nothing of the short (I've bought Writer Pro). It's exactly this: you select "verbs" and the verbs are highlighted. You select "nouns" and the nouns are. Same for adjectives, adverbs, prepositions (as, from, in) and conjuctions (and, or). Nothing earth shattering, nothing you can't do with simply tagging words, nothing marchine-learning or AI about it. Here's an example: http://imgur.com/NrseuZV http://imgur.com/NrseuZV P.S Damn, it's even worse than that. All the hard work -- which was not that hard itself -- was already made by Apple in their CoreText API. According to the Verge: "the heavy lifting is already baked into Apple’s developer platform. Since iOS 5 and OS X 10.7, Apple has provided a class called NSLinguisticTagger that segments natural-language text and labels the text with various bits of information, including parts of speech".
  - bosie 13y ago
    thank you for the screenshot. though i do wonder, what exactly is it highlighting? "in programming terms," - why is programming a verb and what good does it do to highlight it?
    - coldtea 13y ago
      Because it's as naive an implementation as it can be, as I said. Programming can be a verb and a noun, and it just happens they have it tagged as a verb -- context and syntax be damned. (Or actually, it's Apple's API that does the tagging. They just take advantage of it, and do the oh-so-difficult work of highligting the tagged words) Unlike, say, Word's "syntax correct" feature, "Syntax Control" has very little to do with recognising syntax.

by daemonk 13y ago

chime 13y ago

As I understood from the original blog post, it identifies bad syntax more easily, enabling you to correct them. In programming terms, it would be a macro that finds code smells and lets you refactor easily. The example he gave was identifying excessive adjective use. Imaging writing a 100+ page document and doing Menu > Syntax Control > Adjectives and seeing all the places where you use unnecessary adjectives. Or really long, run-on sentences. Or extra semicolons. These may be correct grammatically but they might lower readability so you want to minimize their use. I could be wrong but I think this is what they meant by Syntax Control - ability to detect syntax use in English and not highlight/fading text color. If it is the former, I can absolutely see why it took four years to create.

coldtea 13y ago
Actually you're overthinking it. It's nothing of the short (I've bought Writer Pro). It's exactly this: you select "verbs" and the verbs are highlighted. You select "nouns" and the nouns are. Same for adjectives, adverbs, prepositions (as, from, in) and conjuctions (and, or). Nothing earth shattering, nothing you can't do with simply tagging words, nothing marchine-learning or AI about it. Here's an example: http://imgur.com/NrseuZV http://imgur.com/NrseuZV P.S Damn, it's even worse than that. All the hard work -- which was not that hard itself -- was already made by Apple in their CoreText API. According to the Verge: "the heavy lifting is already baked into Apple’s developer platform. Since iOS 5 and OS X 10.7, Apple has provided a class called NSLinguisticTagger that segments natural-language text and labels the text with various bits of information, including parts of speech".
- bosie 13y ago
  thank you for the screenshot. though i do wonder, what exactly is it highlighting? "in programming terms," - why is programming a verb and what good does it do to highlight it?
  - coldtea 13y ago
    Because it's as naive an implementation as it can be, as I said. Programming can be a verb and a noun, and it just happens they have it tagged as a verb -- context and syntax be damned. (Or actually, it's Apple's API that does the tagging. They just take advantage of it, and do the oh-so-difficult work of highligting the tagged words) Unlike, say, Word's "syntax correct" feature, "Syntax Control" has very little to do with recognising syntax.