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mikpanko / expresso

Tool to analyze, edit and compare text styles in English -
expresso-app.org
MIT License
246 stars 34 forks source link

Identify slow wind ups and unnecessary prepositions #2

Open jbmartin opened 10 years ago

jbmartin commented 10 years ago

Might be useful to implement the paramedic method, which could highlight prepositions (independent of stop words) and sentences starting with dependent clauses.

mikpanko commented 10 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion and the link! It is a nice method. I don't quite see how to put it into an automatic, algorithmic form to add to Expresso. Passive voice and weak verbs are already highlighted. I guess, I can highlight prepositions as well. If there is a cluster of them nearby, the sentence can probably be improved. Does this sound right to you?

jbmartin commented 10 years ago

I agree: designing an algorithm that performs the paramedic method would be a little tricky. Possible metrics could be ratio of prepositions to words in a sentence and does a sentence start with a dependent clause. Does the NLTK package have a way to identify dependent clauses?

mikpanko commented 10 years ago

It looks like NLTK does not have a good dependency parser of sentences but Stanford does. I am thinking of adding it to Expresso in April-May, when I finish my PhD.

jbmartin commented 10 years ago

Good luck on your defense! If I get a little bit of time, I can also try to take a stab at it.

mikpanko commented 10 years ago

Thanks! Yes, feel free to add functionality. I appreciate other people's input.