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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

#41

Post by tolerance »

I would much rather check my writing against grammatical rules that are hard coded in an open source program—meaning that I can change them—than ones that I imagine would be subject to prompt fiddling or worse; implicitly hard coded in a tangle of training data that the LLM would draw from.

The Neovim configuration for the LSP looks neat: https://writewithharper.com/docs/integrations/neovim

The whole thing seems cool. Automattic should mention this on their homepage. Tools like this are the future of something.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#42

Post by shortformblog »

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 two competitors it compares itself to can also be run locally.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#43

Post by Tsarp »

demarq wrote: post #13

"Me and Jennifer went to have seen the ducks cousin." No errors detected. So this needs a lot of rule contributions to get to Grammarly level.

I was initially impressed. But then I tested a bunch, it wasn't catching some really basic things. Mostly hit or miss.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#44

Post by perching_aix »

Groxx wrote: post #26
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?

uh. yes? it's far from uncommon, and sometimes it's ludicrously wrong. Grammarly has been getting quite a lot of meme-content lately showing stuff like that. it is of course mostly very good at it, but it's very far from "trustworthy", and it tends to mirror mistakes you make.

Do you have any examples? The only time I noticed an LLM make a language mistake was when using a quantized model (gemma) with my native language (so much smaller training data pool).

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#45

Post by dartharva »

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?

Because this "language learning tool" will be dominantly used to avoid actually learning the language.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#47

Post by dartharva »

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?

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#48

Post by Semaphor »

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 use it (well, languagetool) in the free version for comments on sites like this. It directly catches mistakes I make, that I'd normally only catch on re-reads. From typos, over my brain doing weird stuff, to sometimes things I simply didn't (actively) know.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#49

Post by facundo_olano »

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?

As a non native English speaker/writer there are a bunch of errors I miss, no matter how much attention I pay and how much I proofread, and these tools are useful to catch those.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#50

Post by jethro_tell »

boplicity wrote: post #31
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.

The internet, especially post phone keyboards, is extremely inconsistent about punctuation. I’m not sure how anyone could think an llm wouldn’t be.
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