Microsoft Word 2003 French grammar checker not as good as Word 98/2000?

Hi !

<kadar2001@yahoo.com> a écrit

Hi,

One of users in our organization is complaining that the French grammar
checking feature in Word 2003 is not as good as it used to be in Word
98 and Word 2000. Is it true?

Oooh !!! Thierry Fontenelle would be very disappointed !!!
See this link :
http://blogs.msdn.com/correcteurorthographiqueoffice/archive/2005/11/29/497672.aspx

I think that your user did'nt install the new Office 2003 French Grammar
Checker
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid{A7030C-FB69-4B57-98B1-AA92D9C28D4B&displaylang=en

Bonne chance ! ;)

Circé
mvp word
http://faqword.free.fr

She thinks that Word 2003 doesn't pick up

the obvious french grammatical errors. In the older versions the
grammar checker would pick up on lack of agreement between/among verbs
in the same sentence or even paragraphs, such as "I sit and he sat at
the table together." It does not pick up these and other glaring
errors such as on run-on sentences, fragments, etc. (in French).
I have downloaded and installed all the latest updates from Mircosoft
office update site. It didn't help. According to this user, in the
following sentence in French it doesn't put the red underline for "de"
and "les". The sentence she typed on Word 2003 (the language is set to
French) was : Voici de francais que est mal ecris pur faires les test.
The Word 2003 underlined francais, ecris and faires (indicating
errors/suggestions), but not de and les. According to this user the
previous versions of Word used to catch all these errors. Any
information/pointer to the right source for more information from the
experienced users of French grammar checking feature is highly
appreciated.

RS

Hi,

Thanks a lot for this question. I am not sure you installed the latest
version of the French grammar checker, as Circé points out: it’s included in
Office 2003 Service Pack 2, which was released in September 2005.

It’s of course impossible to judge the quality of a grammar checker on the
basis of a single sentence. Moreover, users should realize that a grammar
checker needs a syntactic parser (to analyze the sentence automatically and
try to figure out where the subject is, where the verb is, etc). If a
sentence contains a mistake in every single word, as is the case in your
example, no grammar checker will probably be able to correct it (whether the
Microsoft one or any other one). Another thing to note is that users are
first of all expected to spell-check the document before we can expect the
grammar checker to work with some reasonable level of confidence.
What makes me think your user does not have the latest version is that I
don’t have the same behavior on my Office 2003 SP2 version. In the sentence
that you give:

Voici de francais que est mal ecris pur faires les tests.

« francais » and « ecris » are red-squiggled and “les test” is
green-squiggled (and “les tests” or “le test” are suggested, unlike what you
found on your own version).

I would like to point out that the grammar checker is designed to correct
the most frequent mistakes, not all possible (and artificial) mistakes. It is
therefore very easy to invent test sentences like the one above where no
existing tool would be able to rewrite the whole sentence because the input
is too bad. The latest version was developed on the basis of a very big
typology of real errors and the aim is to try to provide a tool that is sure
about the errors it flags, and therefore less annoying and more useful than a
tool which gives the impression that it catches “all possible mistakes” but
also over-flags and finds errors where there are none (it’s usually a
trade-off: we need to capture as many mistakes as possible, but increasing
the number of mistakes that are spotted often means that the number of “false
flags” also increases; in the very old versions of the grammar checker, we
realized that many users were switching it off because the number of false
flags was too high and they no longer knew whether they were able to trust
the tool when it flagged something). We have now made a very big progress
when it comes to identifying agreement errors like "past participles" vs
"infinitives", "past participle agreement", the "a/à" distinction, etc...
(see also
http://blogs.msdn.com/correcteurorthographiqueoffice/archive/2005/10/31/487094.aspx
for a discussion of the improvements and some references to how they were
perceived by some of the people who spend their life trying to see how these
very tricky problems can be solved ;-).

But if you have real sentences with errors which you think should be
corrected, please feel free to give them, since we are interested in using
your valuable feedback.

Best wishes,

Thierry Fontenelle
Microsoft Speech & Natural Language

Hi !

<kadar2001@yahoo.com> a écrit

Hi,

One of users in our organization is complaining that the French grammar
checking feature in Word 2003 is not as good as it used to be in Word
98 and Word 2000. Is it true?

Oooh !!! Thierry Fontenelle would be very disappointed !!!
See this link :
http://blogs.msdn.com/correcteurorthographiqueoffice/archive/2005/11/29/497672.aspx

I think that your user did'nt install the new Office 2003 French Grammar
Checker
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid{A7030C-FB69-4B57-98B1-AA92D9C28D4B&displaylang=en

Bonne chance ! ;)

Circé
mvp word
http://faqword.free.fr

She thinks that Word 2003 doesn't pick up

the obvious french grammatical errors. In the older versions the
grammar checker would pick up on lack of agreement between/among verbs
in the same sentence or even paragraphs, such as "I sit and he sat at
the table together." It does not pick up these and other glaring
errors such as on run-on sentences, fragments, etc. (in French).
I have downloaded and installed all the latest updates from Mircosoft
office update site. It didn't help. According to this user, in the
following sentence in French it doesn't put the red underline for "de"
and "les". The sentence she typed on Word 2003 (the language is set to
French) was : Voici de francais que est mal ecris pur faires les test.
The Word 2003 underlined francais, ecris and faires (indicating
errors/suggestions), but not de and les. According to this user the
previous versions of Word used to catch all these errors. Any
information/pointer to the right source for more information from the
experienced users of French grammar checking feature is highly
appreciated.

RS

Bonjoir(c) Thierry Fontenelle [MSFT]

et voila, ça cause de grammaire ou d'orthographe (même en n'englishe) et
super Thierry arrive ;-)
Allez, dis nous tous, t'as un filtre sur les mots clés ?!

Je l'ai déjà dis et je le redis encore, c'est vraiment super d'avoir ton
concours sur ce forum. Merci, sincèrement !

Dit, c'est quand que tu te clones pour les autres forums ? :-)
Oui, je sais, ta femme t'as déjà dis que tu es unique, mais bon, avec
les technos de MS, ça devrait bientôt être possible, non ? ;-)))

--
JièL / Jean-Louis GOUBERT
La FAQ Outlook est la : http://faq.outlook.free.fr

Hi,

Thanks a lot for this question. I am not sure you installed the latest
version of the French grammar checker, as Circé points out: it’s included in
Office 2003 Service Pack 2, which was released in September 2005.

It’s of course impossible to judge the quality of a grammar checker on the
basis of a single sentence. Moreover, users should realize that a grammar
checker needs a syntactic parser (to analyze the sentence automatically and
try to figure out where the subject is, where the verb is, etc). If a
sentence contains a mistake in every single word, as is the case in your
example, no grammar checker will probably be able to correct it (whether the
Microsoft one or any other one). Another thing to note is that users are
first of all expected to spell-check the document before we can expect the
grammar checker to work with some reasonable level of confidence.
What makes me think your user does not have the latest version is that I
don’t have the same behavior on my Office 2003 SP2 version. In the sentence
that you give:

Voici de francais que est mal ecris pur faires les tests.

« francais » and « ecris » are red-squiggled and “les test” is
green-squiggled (and “les tests” or “le test” are suggested, unlike what you
found on your own version).

I would like to point out that the grammar checker is designed to correct
the most frequent mistakes, not all possible (and artificial) mistakes. It is
therefore very easy to invent test sentences like the one above where no
existing tool would be able to rewrite the whole sentence because the input
is too bad. The latest version was developed on the basis of a very big
typology of real errors and the aim is to try to provide a tool that is sure
about the errors it flags, and therefore less annoying and more useful than a
tool which gives the impression that it catches “all possible mistakes” but
also over-flags and finds errors where there are none (it’s usually a
trade-off: we need to capture as many mistakes as possible, but increasing
the number of mistakes that are spotted often means that the number of “false
flags” also increases; in the very old versions of the grammar checker, we
realized that many users were switching it off because the number of false
flags was too high and they no longer knew whether they were able to trust
the tool when it flagged something). We have now made a very big progress
when it comes to identifying agreement errors like "past participles" vs
"infinitives", "past participle agreement", the "a/à" distinction, etc...
(see also
http://blogs.msdn.com/correcteurorthographiqueoffice/archive/2005/10/31/487094.aspx
for a discussion of the improvements and some references to how they were
perceived by some of the people who spend their life trying to see how these
very tricky problems can be solved ;-).

But if you have real sentences with errors which you think should be
corrected, please feel free to give them, since we are interested in using
your valuable feedback.

Best wishes,

Thierry Fontenelle
Microsoft Speech & Natural Language

Hi !

<kadar2001@yahoo.com> a écrit

Hi,

One of users in our organization is complaining that the French grammar
checking feature in Word 2003 is not as good as it used to be in Word
98 and Word 2000. Is it true?
Oooh !!! Thierry Fontenelle would be very disappointed !!!

See this link :
http://blogs.msdn.com/correcteurorthographiqueoffice/archive/2005/11/29/497672.aspx

I think that your user did'nt install the new Office 2003 French Grammar
Checker
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid{A7030C-FB69-4B57-98B1-AA92D9C28D4B&displaylang=en

Bonne chance ! ;)

Circé
mvp word
http://faqword.free.fr

She thinks that Word 2003 doesn't pick up

the obvious french grammatical errors. In the older versions the
grammar checker would pick up on lack of agreement between/among verbs
in the same sentence or even paragraphs, such as "I sit and he sat at
the table together." It does not pick up these and other glaring
errors such as on run-on sentences, fragments, etc. (in French).
I have downloaded and installed all the latest updates from Mircosoft
office update site. It didn't help. According to this user, in the
following sentence in French it doesn't put the red underline for "de"
and "les". The sentence she typed on Word 2003 (the language is set to
French) was : Voici de francais que est mal ecris pur faires les test.
The Word 2003 underlined francais, ecris and faires (indicating
errors/suggestions), but not de and les. According to this user the
previous versions of Word used to catch all these errors. Any
information/pointer to the right source for more information from the
experienced users of French grammar checking feature is highly
appreciated.

RS

I think that your user did'nt install the new Office 2003 French Grammar
Checker

Sans compter la confusion entre orthographe et grammaire,
le rouge et le vert aurait dit un homme de lettres.

--
A+

euh, salut JièL, non, je n'ai pas de filtre: je venais d'envoyer le lien du
forum Word à un collègue dont le français n'est pas la langue maternelle et
je suis arrivé quelques minutes après la réponse de Circé... Impossible de
résister à la tentation de répondre, bien sûr... :-)

Ma femme me confirme qu'elle refuse qu'on me clone. Elle a peur d'avoir
encore plus de dictionnaires et de grammaires à la maison, je crois... ;-)

Thierry

Bonjoir(c) Thierry Fontenelle [MSFT]

et voila, ça cause de grammaire ou d'orthographe (même en n'englishe) et
super Thierry arrive ;-)
Allez, dis nous tous, t'as un filtre sur les mots clés ?!

Je l'ai déjà dis et je le redis encore, c'est vraiment super d'avoir ton
concours sur ce forum. Merci, sincèrement !

Dit, c'est quand que tu te clones pour les autres forums ? :-)
Oui, je sais, ta femme t'as déjà dis que tu es unique, mais bon, avec
les technos de MS, ça devrait bientôt être possible, non ? ;-)))

--
JièL / Jean-Louis GOUBERT
La FAQ Outlook est la : http://faq.outlook.free.fr

Hi,

Thanks a lot for this question. I am not sure you installed the latest
version of the French grammar checker, as Circé points out: it’s included in
Office 2003 Service Pack 2, which was released in September 2005.

It’s of course impossible to judge the quality of a grammar checker on the
basis of a single sentence. Moreover, users should realize that a grammar
checker needs a syntactic parser (to analyze the sentence automatically and
try to figure out where the subject is, where the verb is, etc). If a
sentence contains a mistake in every single word, as is the case in your
example, no grammar checker will probably be able to correct it (whether the
Microsoft one or any other one). Another thing to note is that users are
first of all expected to spell-check the document before we can expect the
grammar checker to work with some reasonable level of confidence.
What makes me think your user does not have the latest version is that I
don’t have the same behavior on my Office 2003 SP2 version. In the sentence
that you give:

Voici de francais que est mal ecris pur faires les tests.

« francais » and « ecris » are red-squiggled and “les test” is
green-squiggled (and “les tests” or “le test” are suggested, unlike what you
found on your own version).

I would like to point out that the grammar checker is designed to correct
the most frequent mistakes, not all possible (and artificial) mistakes. It is
therefore very easy to invent test sentences like the one above where no
existing tool would be able to rewrite the whole sentence because the input
is too bad. The latest version was developed on the basis of a very big
typology of real errors and the aim is to try to provide a tool that is sure
about the errors it flags, and therefore less annoying and more useful than a
tool which gives the impression that it catches “all possible mistakes” but
also over-flags and finds errors where there are none (it’s usually a
trade-off: we need to capture as many mistakes as possible, but increasing
the number of mistakes that are spotted often means that the number of “false
flags” also increases; in the very old versions of the grammar checker, we
realized that many users were switching it off because the number of false
flags was too high and they no longer knew whether they were able to trust
the tool when it flagged something). We have now made a very big progress
when it comes to identifying agreement errors like "past participles" vs
"infinitives", "past participle agreement", the "a/à" distinction, etc...
(see also
http://blogs.msdn.com/correcteurorthographiqueoffice/archive/2005/10/31/487094.aspx
for a discussion of the improvements and some references to how they were
perceived by some of the people who spend their life trying to see how these
very tricky problems can be solved ;-).

But if you have real sentences with errors which you think should be
corrected, please feel free to give them, since we are interested in using
your valuable feedback.

Best wishes,

Thierry Fontenelle
Microsoft Speech & Natural Language

Hi !

<kadar2001@yahoo.com> a écrit

Hi,

One of users in our organization is complaining that the French grammar
checking feature in Word 2003 is not as good as it used to be in Word
98 and Word 2000. Is it true?
Oooh !!! Thierry Fontenelle would be very disappointed !!!

See this link :
http://blogs.msdn.com/correcteurorthographiqueoffice/archive/2005/11/29/497672.aspx

I think that your user did'nt install the new Office 2003 French Grammar
Checker
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid{A7030C-FB69-4B57-98B1-AA92D9C28D4B&displaylang=en

Bonne chance ! ;)

Circé
mvp word
http://faqword.free.fr

She thinks that Word 2003 doesn't pick up

the obvious french grammatical errors. In the older versions the
grammar checker would pick up on lack of agreement between/among verbs
in the same sentence or even paragraphs, such as "I sit and he sat at
the table together." It does not pick up these and other glaring
errors such as on run-on sentences, fragments, etc. (in French).
I have downloaded and installed all the latest updates from Mircosoft
office update site. It didn't help. According to this user, in the
following sentence in French it doesn't put the red underline for "de"
and "les". The sentence she typed on Word 2003 (the language is set to
French) was : Voici de francais que est mal ecris pur faires les test.
The Word 2003 underlined francais, ecris and faires (indicating
errors/suggestions), but not de and les. According to this user the
previous versions of Word used to catch all these errors. Any
information/pointer to the right source for more information from the
experienced users of French grammar checking feature is highly
appreciated.

RS

"kadar2001@yahoo.com" wrote:

Hi,

One of users in our organization is complaining that the French grammar
checking feature in Word 2003 is not as good as it used to be in Word
98 and Word 2000. Is it true? She thinks that Word 2003 doesn't pick up
the obvious french grammatical errors. In the older versions the
grammar checker would pick up on lack of agreement between/among verbs
in the same sentence or even paragraphs, such as "I sit and he sat at
the table together." It does not pick up these and other glaring
errors such as on run-on sentences, fragments, etc. (in French).
I have downloaded and installed all the latest updates from Mircosoft
office update site. It didn't help. According to this user, in the
following sentence in French it doesn't put the red underline for "de"
and "les". The sentence she typed on Word 2003 (the language is set to
French) was : Voici de francais que est mal ecris pur faires les test.
The Word 2003 underlined francais, ecris and faires (indicating
errors/suggestions), but not de and les. According to this user the
previous versions of Word used to catch all these errors. Any
information/pointer to the right source for more information from the
experienced users of French grammar checking feature is highly
appreciated.

RS


I totally agree with you: the last Proof tools are worst than those for the

older MS Office versions!
Always the same war by Microsoft: instead of fixing the known bugs and
problems, simply pack new one into a nice new box... and let the idiots (we,
the users) pay for the whole game !

Bonjour !

'Gilles55' nous a écrit ...

One of users in our organization is complaining that the French grammar
checking feature in Word 2003 is not as good as it used to be in Word
98 and Word 2000.
I totally agree with you: the last Proof tools are worst than those for the

older MS Office versions!

Ils s'expriment tous deux en angliche pour vilipender les correcteurs
du français. C'est assez piquant !!!

Je trouve au contraire les correcteurs plus performants.
Mais il est vrai que le français est ma langue maternelle... :-)

Remarque pour notre référent Thierry : si le correcteur devient
meilleur sur la reconnaissance des fautes des français, est-il
possible que ceci se fasse au détriment des fautes habituelles
de nos cousins anglophones ? En d'autres termes, le travail
d'analyse que vous menez intègre-t-il les fautes des étrangers
qui forcément ne sont pas les mêmes que les nôtres ?

Et réciproquement.
Je pense évidemment à mon nouveau correcteur d'anglais ;-)

Anacoluthe
« Les anglais manquent par trop de correction. »
- LAFAYETTE