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Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

writewithharper.com

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Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#131

Post by healsdata »

Destiner wrote: post #67
healsdata wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grammarly is all in on AI and recently started recommended splitting "wasn't" and added the contraction to the word it modified. Example: "truly wasn't" becomes "was trulyn't" https://imgur.com/a/RQZ2wXA

I don't think an LLM would recommend an edit like that. Has to be a bug in their rule-based system?

Gemini: "Was trulyn't" is a contraction that follows the rules of forming contractions, but it is not a widely used or accepted form in standard English. It is considered grammatically correct in a technical sense, but it's not common usage and can sound awkward or incorrect to native speakers.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#133

Post by chilipepperhott »

msravi wrote: post #123

Looks very good. Was looking to replace ltex (which is really slow), but for some reason the nvim-lspconfig filetype setting for harper doesn't seem to have (la)tex listed as a default, although markdown and typst are listed. Anyone knows why?

Harper maintainer here

We've had some contributors have a go at adding LaTeX support in the past, but they've yet to succeed with a truly polished option. The irregularity of LaTeX makes it somewhat difficult to parse.

We accept contributions, if anyone is interested in getting us across the finish line.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#134

Post by tough »

oersted wrote: post #112

Fantastic work, I was so fed up with Grammarly and instantly installed this. I'm just a bit skeptical about this quote: > Harper takes advantage of decades of natural language research to analyze exactly how your words come together. But it's just a rather small collection of hard-coded rules: https://docs.rs/harper-core/latest/harper_core/linting/trait... Where did the decades of classical NLP go? No gold-standard r…

to someone who would like to study/learn that evolution, any good recs?

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#137

Post by chilipepperhott »

oersted wrote: post #112

Fantastic work, I was so fed up with Grammarly and instantly installed this. I'm just a bit skeptical about this quote: > Harper takes advantage of decades of natural language research to analyze exactly how your words come together. But it's just a rather small collection of hard-coded rules: https://docs.rs/harper-core/latest/harper_core/linting/trait... Where did the decades of classical NLP go? No gold-standard r…

I'll admit it's something of a bold label, but there is truth in it.

Before our rule engine has a chance to touch the document, we run several pre-processing steps that imbue semantic meaning to the words it reads.

> LLMs have completely overshadowed ML NLP methods from 10 years ago, and they themselves replaced decades statistical NLP work, which also replaced another few decades of symbolic grammar-based NLP work.

This is a drastic oversimplification. I'll admit that transformer-based approaches are indeed quite prevalent, but I do not believe that "LLMs" in the conventional sense are "replacing" a significant fraction of NLP research.

I appreciate your skepticism and attention to detail.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#138

Post by efitz »

phoe-krk wrote: post #88
fakedang wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aight you win fam, I was trippin fr. You're absolutely bussin, no cap. Harvard should be taking notes. (^^ alien language that was developed in less than a decade)

Yes, precisely. This "less than a decade" is magnitudes above the hours or days that it would take to manually add those words and idioms to proper dictionaries and/or write new grammar rules to accomodate aspects like skipping "g" in continuous verbs to get "bussin" or "bussin'" instead of "bussing". Thank you for illustrating my point. Also, it takes at most few developers to write those rules into a grammar checki…

I’m glad we have people at HN who could have eliminated decades of effort by tens of thousands of people, had they only been consulted first on the problem.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#139

Post by phoe-krk »

efitz wrote: post #138
phoe-krk wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, precisely. This "less than a decade" is magnitudes above the hours or days that it would take to manually add those words and idioms to proper dictionaries and/or write new grammar rules to accomodate aspects like skipping "g" in continuous verbs to get "bussin" or "bussin'" instead of "bussing". Thank you for illustrating my point. Also, it takes at most few developers to write those rules into a grammar checki…

I’m glad we have people at HN who could have eliminated decades of effort by tens of thousands of people, had they only been consulted first on the problem.

Which effort? Learning a language is something that can't be eliminated. Everyone needs to do it on their own. Writing grammar checking software, though, can be done few times and then copied.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#140

Post by canjobear »

eadmund wrote: post #121
triknomeister wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would lose out on evolution of language.

If a language changes, there are only three possible options: either it becomes more expressive; or it becomes less expressive; or it remains as expressive as before. Certainly we would never want our language to be less expressive. There’s no point to that. And what would be the point of changing for the sake of change? Sure, we blop use the word ‘blop’ instead of the word ‘could’ without losing or gaining anything,…

The world that we need to be expressive about is changing.
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