C#: Grammar rules engine for English?

c++rule-engine

I'm looking for something that may or may not exist. Is there such a thing as an 'English grammar rules engine' available on the Windows platform (specifically for something like .NET or C#)?

Specifically, I'm looking for something that would be able to take a sentence in the 'future tense' and change it to the 'past tense' (based on English grammar rules) … like:

Work on widget software and then meet with Ricardo

to this:

Worked on widget software and then met with Ricardo

Is there a rules engine that does that already?

Best Solution

Talk to this guy, he might have some ideas for you. In general, English is too ambiguous for this type of thing. For example:

Cut paper in half.

Is this an imperative command, or a past-tense sentence fragment? And my personal favourite:

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

Any human can parse that, but only because of a great deal of semantic knowledge.

That being said, there are some things that might be worth looking into, like SharpNLP