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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

#91

Post by tiew9Vii »

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.

Being dyslexic, I was an avid Grammarly user. Once it started adding "AI features" the deterioration was noticeable, I cancelled my subscription and stopped using it a year ago.

I also only ever used the web app, so copy+pasting as installing the app is for all intentness and purposes is installing a key logger.

Grammar works on rules, not sure why that needs an LLM, Grammarly certainly worked better for me when it was more dumb, using rules.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#93

Post by Alex-Programs »

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.

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

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#94

Post by qwery »

phoe-krk wrote: post #83
qwery wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please share your reasoning that led you to this conclusion -- that natural language "evolves slowly". You also seem to be making an assumption that natural languages (English, I'm assuming) can be well defined by a simple set of rigid patterns/rules?

> Please share your reasoning that led you to this conclusion -- that natural language "evolves slowly". Languages are used to successfully communicate. To achieve this, all parties involved in the communication must know the language well enough to send and receive messages. This obviously includes messages that transmit changes in the language, for instance, if you tried to explain to your parents the meaning of th…

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 disable such features altogether.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#95

Post by Dr4kn »

Alex-Programs wrote: post #93
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.

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 opinion, how much more useful a model trained for specific uses is.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#96

Post by phoe-krk »

qwery wrote: post #94
phoe-krk wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please share your reasoning that led you to this conclusion -- that natural language "evolves slowly". Languages are used to successfully communicate. To achieve this, all parties involved in the communication must know the language well enough to send and receive messages. This obviously includes messages that transmit changes in the language, for instance, if you tried to explain to your parents the meaning of th…

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 have a lot of the basics already nailed down. Natural language grammar can often be represented as "what is allowed to, should, or should not, appear where, when, and in which context" - IIUC, Harper seems to tackle the problem the same way.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#99

Post by shortformblog »

akazantsev wrote: post #61
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…

There are two versions of the LanguageTool: open source and cloud-based. Open source checks the individual words in the dictionary just like the system's spell checker. Maybe there is something more to it, but in my tests, it did not fix even obvious errors. It's not an alternative to Grammarly or this tool.

There is. It can be heavily customized to your needs and built to leverage a large ngram data set:

https://dev.languagetool.org/finding-errors-using-n-gram-dat...

I would suggest diving into it more because it seems like you missed how customizable it is.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#100

Post by fakedang »

phoe-krk wrote: post #88
fakedang wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Yes, precisely. This "less than a decade" is magnitudes above the hours or days that it would take to manually add those words and idioms to proper dictionaries and/or write new grammar rules to accomodate aspects like skipping "g" in continuous verbs to get "bussin" or "bussin'" instead of "bussing". Thank you for illustrating my point. Also, it takes at most few developers to write those rules into a grammar checki…

Not exactly. It takes time for those words to become mainstream for a generation. While you'd have to manually add those words in dictionaries, LLMs can learn these words on the fly, based on frequency of usage.
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