index-en.html

<h2><a name="Summary">Summary</a></h2>
<p>
This is the home page for <i lang="ga">An Gramad&oacute;ir</i>,
an open source grammar checking engine.  It is intended
as a platform for the development of sophisticated
natural language processing tools for languages with limited
computational resources.
It is currently implemented for the Irish language (Gaeilge);
upon its release in 2003 this was, to the best of my knowledge,
the first grammar checker
developed for any minority language. 
Ports have been attempted for Afrikaans, Akan,
Cornish, Esperanto, French, Hiligaynon, Icelandic, Igbo,
Languedocien, Scottish Gaelic, <a href="http://www.bickersc.com/">Samoan</a>,
Tagalog, Walloon, and Welsh; see the
<a href="manual/index.html">Developers' Guide</a> for more information
on porting.
</p>
<p>
When I first created An Gramadóir, the only meaning of the Irish word
<i lang="ga">gramad&oacute;ir</i> was “grammarian” or 
“grammar expert”. In recent years, it has taken on the
<a href="https://www.tearma.ie/q/gramad%C3%B3ir/">additional meaning</a>
of a (generic) grammar checker; I don't know if 
I had any influence on this terminological choice!
If you're curious about the pronounciation, you can
now <a href="gramadoir.mp3">listen to the word</a> as it's
pronounced by (an older version of) the wonderful Irish 
speech synthesizer <a href="https://www.abair.tcd.ie/en/">abair.ie</a>.
</p>

<p>
<b>News</b>
<ul>
<li>(April 2021): <a href="https://cruinneog.com/">Cruinneog</a> launched <a href="https://www.gaelgram.ie/">GaelGram</a>, a new cloud-based version of the grammar checker.
<li>(January 2020): Jim O'Regan has created an Irish version of the grammar checker <a href="https://languagetool.org/">LanguageTool</a> based on the rules from <i lang="ga">An Gramadóir</i>.</li>
<li>(May 2019): Eoin Daltún has created a Google Docs plugin for <i lang="ga">An Gramadóir</i> using the public API.</li>
<li>(January 2019): The Phonetics and Speech Laboratory at Trinity College, Dublin has incorporated <i lang="ga">An Gramadóir</i> into <a href="https://www.abair.tcd.ie/scealai/assets/pdf/User_guide.pdf"><i>An Scéalaí</i></a>, on online learning platform for Irish.</li>
<li>(April 2018): I've released a <a href="https://github.com/kscanne/gramadoir/blob/master/API.md">public API</a> for <i lang="ga">An Gramadóir</i> so developers can incorporate grammar checking into their own web sites and apps.</li>
<li>(March 2018): <i lang="ga">An Gramadóir</i> is now hosted at cadhan.com; RIP borel.slu.edu!</li>
<li>(March 2014): You can now use <i lang="ga">An Gramadóir</i> within LibreOffice thanks to an <a href="http://www.scriobh.ie/page.aspx?id=78&l=1">extension</a> developed by Ciarán Campbell and the company Dúrud with funding from COGG.</li>
<li>(June 2010): Our friends at the site <a href="http://scriobh.ie/">scriobh.ie</a> are seeking volunteers to help integrate <i lang="ga">An Gramadóir</i> into OpenOffice.org Writer.</li>
<li>(March 2010): <a href="gaelsceal.png">Article</a> in the first edition of Gaelscéal about <i>Anois</i>, a combination of the grammar checker and <a href="/lsg/index-en.html">my thesaurus</a> in one package.</li>
<li>(May 2009): <a href="http://nos.ie/teic/ceart-gaelspell/">Review</a> of Ceart and GaelSpell in the Irish magazine <a href="http://nos.ie/">nós*</a>.</li>
<li>(March 2009): Diarmaid Mac Mathúna interviewed on <a href="https://podcast.rasset.ie/podcasts/2009/pc/pod-v-050309-57m16s-ronanbeo.mp3">Ronan Beo</a>.</li>
<li>(March 2009): Ceart and GaelSpell featured on the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNSkeGRJCSY">RTÉ News</a>!</li>
<li>(March 2009): There's an article by Pól Ó Muirí about Ceart in the <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/2.663/tugann-an-teicneola%C3%ADocht-d%C3%BAshl%C3%A1n-ghramadach-na-gaeilge-1.714976">Irish Times</a>.</li>
<li>(August 2008): Version 0.7 of the gramadoir engine released.</li>
<li>(June 2008): I gave a presentation on <i lang="ga">An Gramadóir</i> at the <a href="http://www.naaclt.org/">NAACLT</a> conference at the University of Rio Grande in Ohio.</li>
<li>(May 2008): Ceart was named to the Barr-50 Gnó le Gaeilge — a list of the top 50 businesses that make use of the Irish language.</li>
<li>(October 2007): Diarmaid Mac Mathúna was interviewed about Ceart and GaelSpell on the Raidió na Gaeltachta program <i>Glór Aniar</i>.</li>
<li>(January 2007): Article about Ceart in the Galway Advertiser.</li>
<li>(December 2006): Kevin Donnelly has launched an online version of Welsh Gramadóir called <i>Klebran</i>.</li>
<li>(July 2006): <i>Ceart</i>, a standalone GUI version of the Irish grammar checker, has been released by <a href="https://cruinneog.com/">Cruinneog</a>.</li>
</ul>
</p>

<hr>
<h2><a name="Features">Features</a></h2>
<i lang="ga">An Gramadóir</i> is:
<ul>
<li><b>Portable</b>.  As of version 0.5 the core engine is 
written entirely in Perl which means it will run on just about
<a href="http://www.cpan.org/ports/index.html">anything that plugs in</a>.
It has been tested on a variety of
platforms and operating systems:
Linux (x86, ppc, amd64),
*BSD (x86),
Sun Solaris,
DEC alpha,
Mac OSX,
and Windows.</li>
<li><b>Modular</b>.   The Perl module provides separate interfaces
for sentence segmentation, spell checking, part-of-speech tagging,
and grammar checking.   These components provide a platform for the development of applications for much more complex natural language processing tasks
(e.g. parsing, machine translation).</li>
<li><b>Easy to use</b>.  There is a simple command line interface 
that reads text from standard input and writes errors to standard
output (you can see some actual output on
the <a href="sampla-en.html">Sampler page</a>). 
Or, you can try the software now using the
<a href="foirm-en.html">Web Interface</a>.
There are also interfaces that allow the grammar checker to
be called from the text editors <a href="sios-en.html#Editors">emacs, vim, and OpenOffice</a>.
Last but not least, if you have a Mac you can try
the Java front-end <i>Ceart</i>
developed by <a href="https://cruinneog.com/">Cruinneog</a>.</li>
<li><b>Corpus-based</b>.  Various components of the engine can be 
bootstrapped from corpora harvested by my web crawling
software <a href="http://crubadan.org/">An Crúbadán</a>.  This is
essential for languages with severely limited resources, allowing 
rapid development with a minimum of effort.</li>
<li><b>Easy to develop</b>.  I've tried to design the language
developers' pack so that no programming experience is needed.
All Perl code is generated automatically from a number
of (hopefully simple) plain text input files.
This is especially important for minority languages where in 
many cases there is a lack of trained linguists, software
developers, or both.</li>
<li><b>Scalable</b>.    With as little as an hour or two of work (editing
word lists output by my web crawler) a developer can have a decent
spell checking package up and running.   On the other hand, the
engine is flexible enough to allow for full-scale grammar checking
(as evidenced by the rococo Irish version).</li>
<li><b>Language independent</b>.   (More or less).  Most open source 
language technology is designed with (Indo-)European languages in mind.
To counter this trend I've included things like full Unicode support and
better support for
the rich morphological phenomena found in many non-European languages.</li>
<li><b>Free Software</b>.  
It is released under the 
<a href="https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html">GNU General Public License</a>
which means (roughly speaking) 
that you are free to copy, modify, or even sell this 
software as long as redistributed versions preserve these same freedoms.</li>
</ul>