🚀 go-pugleaf

In a recent posting to comp.text, lj@spdcc.COM (Len Jacobs) writes ...

> Does anyone have any experience using Houghton Mifflin's
> text analysis system?  Apparently written in C it is presently
> only available on VMS machines, but soon to be ported more
> broadly.

I read some of H-M's promotional bumph for this system around 18
months ago, at which point I suspected no one had used it -- all the
"quotes from the great" on the back of the brochure spoke in the
future tense, eg "It would be great to have something like this ...".
I'd be interested to hear of anyone who has actually used it, or seen
it work in real life.

> Supposedly this system has the power of AT&T's Writers Workbench, but
> is much more compact.  (Anyone hear anything lately about WWB?)

At least as far as the claims in that brochure were concerned (and it
did include pics of the screen, although I suppose they could have
been mocked up easily), the system is supposed to be far superior to
WWB.  WWB -- at least last I heard -- doesn't do any syntactic
checking at all, in fact doesn't even have a parts of speech
dictionary except for the closed class words and a few others.
CorrecText, however, in order to do what is claimed for it, would have
to have reasonably sophisticated parsing with a pretty complete
dictionary.  So, it's more much more comparable to IBM's
EPISTLE/CRITIQUE (although I've never spoken to anyone who's actually
seen that working in real life either) than to WWB.

More vaporware?  

R


-- 
Robert Dale	   Phone: +44 31 667 1011 x6470	| University of Edinburgh
UUCP:	...!uunet!mcvax!ukc!its63b!epistemi!rda	| Centre for Cognitive Science
ARPA:	rda%epistemi.ed.ac.uk@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk  | 2 Buccleuch Place
JANET:	rda@uk.ac.ed.epistemi			| Edinburgh EH8 9LW Scotland