Automating editorial assistance

The problem of errors in text is particularly severe in the publishing world, where high standards are required. The editor´s job often involves extensive rewriting and high-level reorganisation of a text, but the most time consuming tasks are copy editing and proofreading. The paper describes a system whose purpose is to assist a human writer or editor in massaging a text to deal with these kinds of errors. Rules of grammar, style, punctuation and usage can be maintained as rules in a knowledge base, distinct from the mechanism that applies those rules against a text. The research described in the paper is concerned with assisting an editor in ensuring the correctness of low-level matters such as the use of punctuation, the format of numbers and numerical values, and the use of abbreviations. The Editor´s Assistant operates by interactively detecting and, where possible, offering corrections for those aspects of a text which do not conform to the rules of style embodied in the knowledge base in use