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How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker

theguardian.com

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Re: How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker

#21

Post by js_herbert »

iainmerrick wrote: post #16
dmje wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably worth taking into account their line in that article about how good they are at fast-turnaround journalism. Typos are always going to happen in that environment I’d guess.

1. Why, with good tools available? 2. Can't they at least fix typos quickly? 3. I still regularly see trivial grammar errors (repeated words, etc) in opinion pieces on the Guardian, not just breaking news and liveblogs. I guess some of those opinions pieces might be treated as "fast-turnaround journalism", AKA "hot takes". The rate of simple typos there makes me wonder about more important things like factual accurac…

It's worth noting that Typerighter doesn't include a dictionary yet – it only helps our journalists with style-guide related errors. A dictionary is on the roadmap, though.

Re: How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker

#22

Post by jopsen »

lindig wrote: post #19

Software in the 21st century: to check a bunch of regex on a text you need: Grafana, APIs, services. Really? I'm surprised there is no k8s in here. /s

> Software in the 21st century

Early 21s century -- hopefully there is more to come :D

Re: How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker

#24

Post by foldr »

triceratops wrote: post #5
mellosouls wrote: post #3

For those unaware "Grauniad" is a decades-old nickname for The Guardian, used particularly by satirical mag Private Eye in reference to its reputation at one time for typos and the like. https://wordhistories.net/2017/06/05/origin-of-grauniad/

> reputation at one time for typos and the like Well-earned into the present day. I regularly see typos even today.

I was recently moved to write to them on encountering the following completely unparsable sentence:

"People of ethnic group membership can change over time and with age."

They fixed it eventually (though I doubt it had anything to do with my comment).

There was also the following opinion piece, which still makes the utterly absurd claim that Jesse Jackson campaigned for the capitalization of 'African American':

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/21/black-...

(I hope the fact that both of my examples happen to relate somewhat to race doesn't make me sound like an alt right troll. I'm sympathetic to the article. It just seems that there was a major fact checking or editing fail.)

Re: How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker

#25

Post by seeyacall »

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Re: How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker

#26

Post by duckmysick »

lindig wrote: post #19

Software in the 21st century: to check a bunch of regex on a text you need: Grafana, APIs, services. Really? I'm surprised there is no k8s in here. /s

I'll bite. How would you solve the following with the 20th century software without any API or services:

- regex rules are updated frequently (let's say weekly)

- the updates are available to hundreds if not thousands of users in different locations

- all of them have the latest ruleset

- all of them capable of sending feedback regarding how useful and correct the suggestions are

- said feedback is analyzed regularly and used to refine the ruleset

Re: How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker

#27

Post by RobAley »

js_herbert wrote: post #20
kimburgess wrote: post #17

Relying on purely on regex misses so much context available from a document. I've been working on some tooling [1] in this space recently and a core epiphany was noting you can model written language as an AST and then reason about it in this form rather than opaque blocks of text (or flat, sequential text fragments as with Typerighter). An even better realisation was that others had already noted this too and built…

This is definitely true – in this sense, our initial corpus of regexes are the booster stage for this project, in that they enabled us to produce something useful for journalists in a reasonable timeframe. Typerighter's built as a platform for matching text, so we're not tied to regex – at the moment, we're migrating many rules to LanguageTool, which is a part of our pool of matchers and has a more sophisticated set…

Will you (are you) contributing any of the rules back to TL? Or are they to specific to your org?

Re: How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker

#28

Post by modernerd »

When I saw “13,000 regexes” I thought of the adage, “the plural of regex is regrets”.

But here it seems like a good choice to build on a battle-tested library of regrets, and it's clearly working well for them.

The demo looks slicker than the typical Grammarly/MS Word/native macOS grammar and spelling corrections, for those who missed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl0nb94N98k&feature=emb_imp_...

And the ability to flag false positives, send suggestions back, and see metrics of how the system's being used is just awesome.

Re: How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker

#29

Post by mrkwse »

I saw a journalist share Typerighter on Twitter and was intrigued, so I'm looking forward to reading this.

It's a bit surprising that the engineering blog appears to be embedded in the main site, though. I've worked at a news org in the past (admittedly much larger) and the engineering/meta blogs were entirely separated from the main news section. Obviously it doesn't make sense to reinvent your stack, but I'm surprised the surrounding site scaffolding isn't at least distinct to show this isn't primary news output.

Re: How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker

#30

Post by mvidal01 »

mellosouls wrote: post #3

For those unaware "Grauniad" is a decades-old nickname for The Guardian, used particularly by satirical mag Private Eye in reference to its reputation at one time for typos and the like. https://wordhistories.net/2017/06/05/origin-of-grauniad/

I bet some of those those typos came about because the type was hand set.
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