The EPISTLE Text-Critiquing System

gent " functions f o r processing business correspondence and other texts in an ofice environment. This paper focuses on the initial objectives of the system: critiquing written material on points of grammar and style. The overall system is described, with some details of the implementation, the user interface, and the three levels of processing, especially the syntactic parsing of sentences with a computerized English grammar. The long-term objectives of the EPISTLE project are to provide office workers, particularly middle-level managers, with a variety of application packages to help them interact with natural language texts. Initially we are focusing on business letters and on the first of two classes of applications. This first class will provide services for the author, initially furnishing critiques of a draft of a letter or other text, and eventually helping him write an initial draft based on a terse statement of what he wants to say. The second class of applications will deal with incoming texts, synopsizing letter contents, highlighting portions known to be of interest, and automatically generating index terms based on conceptual or thematic characteristics rather than key words. In its current experimental form, the EPISTLE system addresses only the tasks of grammar and style checking of texts written in English. Grammar checking deals with such errors as lack of number agreement between subject and verb; style checking points out such 0 Copyright 1982 by International Business Machines Corporation. Copying in printed form for private use is permitted without payment of royalty provided that (1) each reproduction is done without alteration and (2) the Journal reference and IBM copyright notice are included on the first page. The title and abstract, but no other portions, of this paper may be copied or distributed royalty free without further permission by computer-based and other information-service systems. Permission to republish any other portion of this paper must be obtained from the Editor.