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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

#31

Post by motohagiography »

Funny, though I am unshocked that they have figured out a way to automatically generate cant.

What does make it interesting is if it were applied as a GPT-2/3 module, and let loose as a reddit comment bot to train a model for engagement and provocation. Editors are essentially model supervisors, and if the object is to provoke and flatter people to sell advertising, it seems more like a compute problem to distill this process into a business.

Human writers creating organic content aren't really necessary for that, and very soon we should be able to generate content and then attribute it to loyal personalities that we stand up as minor celebrities, not unlike the old Hollywood studio system from the early 20th century, where talent was well kept, but still very much kept.

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

#32

Post by js_herbert »

RobAley wrote: post #27
js_herbert wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Taking a look at the corpus, the rules we have currently migrated are very specific to our style guide, and we'd likely be unable to contribute large chunks of the corpus for IP reasons. But this certainly seems possible for more general grammar or style corrections if there was a need – although LT's lists of rules are already quite comprehensive!

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

#33

Post by cormullion »

mvidal01 wrote: post #30
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.

not sure "hand" would be true, though:

https://www.theguardian.com/gnm-archive/gallery/2016/nov/18/...

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

#34

Post by jamessb »

duckmysick wrote: post #26
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…

I think the "20th century" solution to letting many users in different locations run regexes would probably have been to write a cgi-bin script in Perl, and have users paste text into a box on an HTML form.

The results page generated by the script could have checkboxes to mark each suggestion as useful/not-useful/incorrect and a submit button, with this feedback saved in MySQL.

(I'm not sure whether this qualifies as "without ... services")

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