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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

#141

Post by WhyNotHugo »

loughnane wrote: post #128

Surprised coming into this that I don't see anyone mentioning vale[0]. I've been using it for ~4 years now and love it. I use grammarly briefly when it came out and liked the idea. Admittedly it has more polish than vale for people writing in google docs, &c. Still, I stick with Vale. Is there any case for moving to Harper? [0] https://vale.sh/

Vale requires a lot of tweaking, and I’ve never been able to get a rule set with which I’m happy.

It’s missing a default rule set with rules that are generally okay without being too opinionated.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#142

Post by Szpadel »

icapybara wrote: post #24

Why wouldn't you want an LLM for a language learning tool? Language is one of things I would trust an LLM completely on. Have you ever seen ChatGPT make an English mistake?

I tried to use one LLM based tool to rewrite sentence in more official corporate form, and it rewrote something like "we are having issues with xyz" into "please provide more information and I'll do my best to help".

LLMs are trained so hard to be helpful that it's really hard to contain them into other tasks

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#144

Post by monkeywork »

Dr4kn wrote: post #95
Alex-Programs wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DeepL Write was pretty good in the post-LLM, pre-ChatGPT era.

DeepL is different in my opinion. They always focused on machine learning for languages. They must have acquired fantastic data for their Models. Especially because of the business language and professional translations which they focus on. They keep your intended message in tact and just refine it. Like a book post editing. Grammarly and other tools force you to sound like they think is best. DeepL shows, in my opin…

Any suggestions for models ppl can run locally that are close to deepl

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#145

Post by dmoy »

fakedang wrote: post #87
phoe-krk wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural languages evolve so slowly that writing and editing rules for them is easily achievable even this way. Think years versus minutes.

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)

Pedantically,

aight, trippin, fr (at least the spoken version), and fam were all very common in the 1990s (which was the last decade I was able to speak like that without getting jeered at by peers).

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#147

Post by jordanpg »

dartharva wrote: post #47

I never understood the appeal of grammar tools. If you have reached the minimum professional/academic level needed to be designated to write something, shouldn't you at least be capable of verifying its semantic "correctness" just by reading through it once yourself? Why would you pass a writing job to someone who isn't 100% fluent in the language and then make up for it by buying complex tools?

I'm a lawyer. I write 10s of pages of text every day. "Reading through it once yourself" is obviously an imperfect solution. See, e.g., Poisson statistics. It's also slow and I bill in 6-minute increments. There is significant value in a grammar tool that protects confidentiality and is more effective than my wetware.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#149

Post by unfitted2545 »

shortformblog wrote: post #42

LanguageTool (a Grammarly competitor) is also open source and can be managed locally: https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool I generally run it in a Docker container on my local machine: https://hub.docker.com/r/erikvl87/languagetool I haven't messed with Harper closely but I am aware of its existence. It's nice to have options, though. It would sure be nice if the Harper website made clear that one of the…

This is a really nice app to use LanguageTool, it runs the server in the flatpak: https://flathub.org/apps/re.sonny.Eloquent

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#150

Post by qwery »

phoe-krk wrote: post #96
qwery wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, thanks for replying. I don't see the task of specifying a grammar as straightforward as you do, perhaps. I guess I just didn't understand the chain of comments. I find that clear-cut, rigid rules tend to be the least helpful ones in writing. Obviously this class of rule is also easy/easier to represent in software, so it also tends to be the source of false positives and frustration that lead me to disab…

When you do writing as a form of art, rules are meant to be bent or broken; it's useful to have the ability to explicitly write new ones and make new forms of the language legal, rather than wrestle with hallucinating LLMs. When writing for utility and communication, though, English grammar is simple and standard enough. Browsing Harper sources, https://github.com/Automattic/harper/blob/0c04291bfec25d0e93... seems to…

I'm certainly not disputing the existence of grammar nor do I think an LLM is a good way to implement/check/enforce one. And now I realise how my first comment landed. Thanks again!
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