The test
32 sentences labelled as ambiguous comparison claims, and 32 controls: eight conformant ratios, eight iteration/rate statements, eight additive or unrelated statements, and eight mentions of the wording. The intended task is to warn on claims, not quotations or advice about a phrase.
Fixtures and rule were frozen before the first execution. They were designed by the same author. This is a diagnostic challenge set, not a held-out sample or an estimate of performance in ordinary prose. Every result, including every miss, is shown below.
The boundary
The proposal concerns the attachment of a multiplier to a comparative. It does not replace arithmetic, supply a missing baseline, resolve units, or say how often people actually misunderstand a phrase.
If a writer means a ratio, “3 times as many” is available. If they mean the old amount plus three more copies, they can say that explicitly. An automatic rewrite from the flagged phrase would silently choose between those intentions.
Proposal discussion and the unresolved comprehension-test question →