French grammar checking lacking

Hi,

I’m trying to work with a client who wants to do spell checking and grammar checking in French. It’s important to do grammar checking in particular in French and they’re finding that there’s not a lot of support for French grammar checking. I speak very little French so unfortunately I can’t add grammar rules and I can’t ask the client for all the rules. Is there anyone who is working on French grammar rules or would be willing to? Any help would be appreciated.

Merci,

Jeff

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Hi Jeff

I maintain the French version of LanguageTool. There are lots of grammar rules in French already, but certainly more rules can still be added. Looking at LanguageTool - Supported Languages you can see that French is currently the language with most xml rules in LanguageTool. The main problem is that I don’t have as much time as I used to for maintaining rules, so not much is happening in the French version of LanguageTool these days.

LanguageTool also detects spelling mistakes but does not propose suggestions, because suggestions with Hunspell would be too slow when checking large amount of text. We could speed up spelling suggestion using a FSA dictionary, but unfortunately, FSA dictionaries have missing features which would degrade detection of spelling errors. So far, I preferred sticking with Hunspell as finding spelling errors is more important in my opinion that proposing corrections.

Besides LanguageTool, there is also Grammalecte which is specifically created for French.

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Thanks for your reply Dominique. I have looked through the grammar.xml for rules for French and of course you’re right, there are lots of rules. I was aware of the corrections not appearing from reading this thread - French has no suggestions of wrong written words at all. I’ll take a look at Grammalecte. Thank you for the suggestion. If the client gives me some specific rules to add i’ll either try to add them myself or make a specific issue with the specific rules.

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Hello all !
I’m working these days on French language and on spelling correction for my thesis.
I am happy to see that I am not the only one. I thought Dominique was engaged only on the “breton” side of the French language :slight_smile:
If you are interested, you can also follow my 2 topics and its updates. They help me to better understand how LT works.