Inspiration
High school students often spend a lot of time double-checking and triple-checking their essay for informal language that English teachers hate.
What it does
This app checks essays for first-person pronouns, second-person pronouns, and contractions. There is the option to exclude quoted text because students must sometimes quote informal works.
How we built it
We used an algorithm based on regex to find the pronouns and differentiate between contractions and possessive nouns.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our algorithm amounts to less than 200 lines of code. It took our best creative thinking and many failed attempts to end with such a compact algorithm.
What we learned
We learned that we should not let the fear that an algorithm will fail in execution or efficiency to deter us from diving in and writing the algorithm. Even if we don't end up using it, we can use it to gain a clearer picture of the problem and how to make a better algorithm.
What's next for Formal Writing Checker
Unsupervised machine learning can enable the algorithm to detect differences in sentence structure between formal writing and informal writing.
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