Is there a freely available sentence patterns search engine?
As the title says.
Background
I often find myself in the need of building an English sentence that I almost know how to get right.
The scaffolding is there, but there are maybe one or two words missing. Maybe just an adjective or an adverb. Maybe I already know a "good enough" word, but I feel I need something better. Maybe I know there is something better, but it just doesn't pop-up in my mind.
Ideally I would like a search engine that allowed me to type something like this:
The name was written on a brass plate that was (?) on the wall beside the door.
Where (?) represents the missing word in some kind of formalized language (like a regular expression or a search expression of some sort).
And the search engine would spit out possible words that could be placed in that spot making the sentence complete and sensible.
Ideally it would also take suggestions about what "meaning" I need, e.g. (?fixed?), so that it would spit out suggestions like "bolted", "latched", "nailed", etc., but not "put", "hanged" or "placed".
I hope you get the point.
Does such a search engine exist and is it freely (as in "free beer") available?
BTW, I'm interested essentially in a tool that manages English, but it's OK if it also manages other languages.
4 answers
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I just tried this in an LLM and it went straight to "affixed". The prompt was "fill in the blank in the sentence".
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Maybe https://quillbot.com/? I haven't used it much myself, but it might perhaps be handy. It can paraphrase, check grammar etc.
Trying it out with your sentence as-is, it proposes to paraphrase it as:
A metal plaque that was (?) mounted on the wall next to the door bore the name.
Although it didn't explicitly fill out the (?), it did add the missing word mounted. It marks changes in the text in yellow (like a "diff tool").
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I guess now that any LLM powered AI tools can respond to this type of query, the answers are not quite as relevant anymore.
However, I wanted to offer a more generic solution to the problem, and something that fits with a Languages & Linguistics flavour.
If you consider linguistic topology rather than the parts of speech as a starting point, you can come up with a much more flexible solution to the problem. This is because most languages can be broken up into its respective topology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_typology), which you can more easily rearrange or interpret without needing an in-depth knowledge of the grammar (which is often full of exceptions).
For example, in English the basic sentences follow a SVO topology (Subject, Verb, Object) like "I like cars". In Japanese, with a SOV topology, the sentence would be written as "I cars like" or "私は 車が 好きです"
I am still working on this concept and building physical representations of this concept, but hopefully a digital version will be made available by someone (if it is not already out there).
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Sketch Engine and COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) that allow users to search for sentence structures, patterns, and phrases across large text databases. These tools are great for linguists, writers, and researchers looking to explore language use in different contexts.
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