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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

#31

Post by boplicity »

pram wrote: post #10

IMO not using LLMs is a big plus in my book. Grammarly has been going downhill since they've been larding it with "AI features," it has become remarkably inconsistent. It will tell me to remove a comma one hour, and then tell me to add it back the next.

General purpose LLMs seem to get very confused about punctuation, in my experience. It's one of their big areas of obvious failing. I'm surprised Grammarly would allow this to happen.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#33

Post by josephcsible »

healsdata wrote: post #32

Given this is an Automattic product, I'm hesitant to use it. If it gets remotely successful, Matt will ruin it in the name of profit.

It's FOSS, so even if the worst happens, anyone could just fork the last good version and continue development there.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#34

Post by o11c »

healsdata wrote: post #30
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?

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

Hm ... I wonder, is Grammarly also responsible for the flood of contraction of lexical "have" the last few years? It's standard in British English, but outside of poetry it is proscribed in almost all other dialects (which only permit contraction of auxiliary "have").

Even in British I'm not sure how widely they actually use it - do they say "I've a car" and "I haven't a car"?

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#35

Post by akdev1l »

healsdata wrote: post #30
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?

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

This is what peak innovation looks like

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#37

Post by cAtte_ »

this solution is just fundamentally insufficient. in the age of LLMs it's pretty insane to imagine programmers manually hard-coding an arbitrary subset of grammatical corrections (sure: it's faster, it's local first, but it's not enough). on top of that, English (like any other natural language) is such a complicated beast that you will never write a classic deterministic parser that's sophisticated enough to allow you to reliably implement even the most basic of grammatical corrections (check the other comments for examples). it's just not gonna happen.

i guess it's a nice and lightweight enhancement on top of the good old spellchecker, though

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#38

Post by filterfish »

o11c wrote: post #34
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

Hm ... I wonder, is Grammarly also responsible for the flood of contraction of lexical "have" the last few years? It's standard in British English, but outside of poetry it is proscribed in almost all other dialects (which only permit contraction of auxiliary "have"). Even in British I'm not sure how widely they actually use it - do they say "I've a car" and "I haven't a car"?

"they" say "I haven't got a car".

Contractions are common in Australian English to, though becoming less so due to the influence of US English.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#40

Post by paxys »

Looks cool, but it's weird to constantly make comparisons to Grammarly (in the post title, description section of the site, benchmarks) when this is clearly a rule-based spellcheck and very different from what Grammarly offers.

Instead tell me how it compares to the built-in spellcheck in my browser/IDE/word processor/OS.

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