State-of-the-art vs state of the art

1

Hi,

currently languagetool always complains about start of the art. According to dict.cc start-of-the-art is an adjective while state of the art is a noun. A sentence like:

“We compare our results to state of the art.”

should be perfectly fine. While the rule is perfect for:

“We present our state-of-the-art solution.”

Unfortunately, I’m unable to create a proper rule for it. I tried to create a rule for state-of-the-art in + NN, but languagetool does detect it as adjective and this will not match: “We compare our results to state-of-the-art.”

Can sb help me with that?

Jan

2

Here’s a rule for one direction, the other direction will need another rule. While dict.cc is great, I’d suggest to find a better source for these kind of corner cases.

<rule id="ID" name="">    
    <pattern>
      <token>state</token>
      <token>of</token>
      <token>the</token>
      <token>art</token>
      <token postag='NN.*|NNS' postag_regexp='yes'></token>
    </pattern>
    <message>...</message>
    <example type='incorrect'>We present our <marker>state of the art solution</marker>.</example>
    <example type='correct'>We present our state-of-the-art solution.</example>
    <example type='correct'>We compare our results to state of the art</example>
    </rule>
3

What would be a better way to validate that? I’m not native speaker.

The rule works this way. Can you replace the current state-of-the-art rule with the new one? It somehow confusing in scientific articles to where state of the art is far more common than state-of-the-art.

Thanks,
Jan

4

A dictionary like http://www.oxforddictionaries.com might be a good place to check - I’m not an English native speaker either. I have just modified the rule as described above.

5

The second correct sentence should be ‘We compare our results to the state of the art’ (with added ‘the’).

I came across this posting because I wanted to point out the same problem with ‘out of place’.
Correct usages would be ‘This word is out of place’ but ‘This is an out-of-place word’.
This issue is common with compound adjectives. As another example, ‘I study middle-ear mechanics’ but ‘I study the mechanics of the middle ear’.

This is my first interaction with (and almost my first use of) LanguageTool so I don’t understand how this is supposed to be dealt with.

6

Thanks, I have added another rule for “out of place”. I don’t know yet how to solve this in a generic way, though (without adding rules for each of these expressions).