Tim wrote:
I'd go along with that. I am a native English speaker, and I've found word processing grammar checking tools leave a lot to be desired. Some of the results, I've seen, give you the impression that a 12 year old wrote the document. They might find some glaring errors, but more subtle ones go un-noticed.
I think you have unreasonable expectations. Back when computers first started to be used to process things other than projectile trajectories, people thought we'd be using them in 20 yrs or so to do real language processing. That was in about 1950 or so. It hasn't ever happened, because the problem is extremely difficult. We perceive language processing to be easy, because we have unperceived hardware assist in our brains. Consider:
"Fruit flies like a banana."
Is "flies" a verb, or a noun?
Mike