Re: Grammar checking

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net>
> Cc: Payas Relekar <relekarpayas@gmail.com>, gregory@heytings.org,
>  rms@gnu.org, m.eliachevitch@posteo.de, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2023 12:55:45 +0000
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > Is the tool any good in practical use (as opposed to marketing-like
> > presentations)?  Did someone try to use it in real use cases, like
> > when writing significant amounts of prose, and if so, could those who
> > did try that please share their experience and impressions?
> 
> I am using it in real-life scenarios for authoring.
> LanguageTool the most sophisticated Libre grammar checker around, AFAIK.

That's not enough, IMO.  It should be good in absolute terms, not in
relative terms.

> It is not ideal and certainly miss various mistakes in comparison with
> proprietary tools like Grammarly, but still much, much better than ispell
> and other Libre grammar/style checkers I tried.

Comparing grammar checking with spell-checking is not useful.  They
are different technologies that are almost orthogonal.  Grammar
checking can find spelling mistakes only by sheer luck, and the
reverse is not possible even by luck.

> I am not 100% sure if LanguageTool is going to be useful universally.
> While it is quite good and even allow extending itself with neural
> network models, the performance is not great - even for smaller texts it
> is taking a lot of CPU and requires 5-15s of seconds to check the amount
> of text constituting my emails (mostly due to slow loading time though).
> For larger texts, time scales up to 10s of seconds - minutes.
> 
> I usually use it similar to M-x ispell-buffer - for checking the
> complete write-ups.
> 
> Also, extending LanguageTool may not be easy, unless using development
> version. It has some strange design decisions - users cannot easily
> supply custom local rules, AFAIK. (Or my google fu is not good enough)
> 
> That said, I had some success feeding buffer text to LanguageTool
> asynchronously - paragraph by paragraph.

Feeding by paragraphs should be good enough, if it takes a few
seconds.