Detect missing determiners before nouns

1

Hi! I wanted to see if it would be possible to get language tool (US English) to detect determiners/articles before improper nouns.

For instance, when I type in the incorrect sentence “I want to see bear.” the tool doesn’t see that a word is missing.

It should be “I want to see a bear” or “I want to see the bear”.

Thanks!

2

You’d have to write a rule for that, as described at Development Overview - LanguageTool Wiki. You could basically detect a verb followed by a singular phrase like this:

<pattern>
  <token postag="VB"/>
  <token chunk="B-NP-singular"/>
</pattern>

Unfortunately, the detection of singular phrases also seems to be confused by the missing determiner. Another approach might look like this, but it creates a lot of false alarms, so this would need to be improved:

 <pattern>
    <token postag='VB'></token>
    <token postag='NN'><exception postag='NN:UN'></exception><exception postag='NN:U'></exception></token>
</pattern>

(NN is a singular verb, NN:UN and NN:U are mass nouns / nouns used as mass nouns)