Re: Grammar checking

[Lynn Winebarger <owinebar@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Apr 21, 2023 at 10:22 PM Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
>   > There's this directory in languagetool's source code that appears to
>   > provide infrastructure for using some RPC protocol for "MLServer"s:
>   > https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool/tree/master/languagetool-core/src/main/java/org/languagetool/rules/ml.
>
> If we wamt to use the free version of Languagetool, this raiss
> important questions.  First of all, does the program as currently
> released try by default to use tha remote protocol?
>
[From subsequent amending email]
>   > Secondarily, how much of the usefulness of that program as
>   > currently released is due to using that dis-service?  And how
>   > would we modify the release to turn that off?
>
> If the program as currently released does NOT try ny default to use
> tha protocol, is there something that they invite users to do so as
> to start using it?  We might want to delete that feature from the version
> we distribute, so we don't end up distributing SaaSS unknowingly.
>

The only concrete description I recall seeing (from an emacs user) is
from Ihor Radchenko in
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2023-03/msg01044.html

The design of the software reflects its intended use in a multi-user
SaaSS server.  If emacs maintainer time is going to be consumed by
ensuring an acceptable version and configuration is installed on user
machines, I hope some consideration (by that maintainer) would be
whether the bulk of the functionality could be implemented in a
simpler, single-user, form in some incremental way - say by an emacs
lisp program running in a batch emacs process.
https://dev.languagetool.org/languages classifies the rules enforced
by LanguageTool into XML, Java-based, spell-checking, and confusion
pairs.  There's a separate 8GB of n-gram data, covering the languages
supported by the languagetool organization.  So, how much work would
be required to meaningfully use the confusion pairs, and what would it
provide.  Or interpreting and applying the XML rules.  Or be more
efficient in the use of the 8GB of n-gram data
(https://dev.languagetool.org/finding-errors-using-n-gram-data).

Maybe the effort wouldn't be worth it, but maybe it would.  I don't
think it's obvious either way.

Lynn