by Lev Hladush
Grammarly is both the name of San-Francisco based company and their main product – a communication assistant that helps correct grammar and typos in word processing to any internet user.
What is especially exciting about Grammarly is that the work of their assistant relies heavily on Artificial Intelligence. Thus making it a particular object of interest for us, students of Management and Artificial Intelligence program. Grammarly uses AI to help millions of people worldwide make their communication clear, effective and error-free. Everyone knows that communication is key to both personal and professional success and the mission of the company to improve lives by improving communication. The big vision behind it is to help people articulate their thoughts in a way that’s clear and effective, in a way that makes them understood as intended.
Core to this mission has been the work in natural language processing (NLP). They rely on their team’s deep expertise in NLP, machine learning (ML) and AI. The way it works is something like this:
Broadly speaking, an artificial intelligence system mimics the way a human would perform a task. AI systems achieve this through different techniques. Machine learning, for example, is a particular methodology of AI that involves teaching an algorithm to perform tasks by showing it lots of examples rather than by providing a series of rigidly predefined steps.
Grammarly’s AI system combines machine learning with a variety of natural language processing approaches. Human language has many levels at which it can be analyzed and processed: from characters and individual words through grammatical structures and sentences, even paragraphs or full texts. Natural language processing is a branch of AI that involves teaching machines to understand and process human language (English, for instance) and perform useful tasks, such as machine translation, sentiment analysis, essay scoring, and, in our case, writing enhancement.
An important part of building an AI system is training it. AIs are kind of like children in that way. Kids learn how to behave by watching the people around them and by positive or negative reinforcement. As with kids, if you want your AI system to grow up to be helpful and functional, you need to be careful about what you expose it to and how you intervene when it gets things wrong.
The first step is choosing high-quality training data for your system to learn from. In Grammarly’s case, that data may take the form of a text corpus—a huge collection of sentences that human researchers have organized and labeled in a way that AI algorithms can understand. If you want your AI to learn the patterns of proper comma usage, for example, you need to show it sentences with incorrect commas, so it can learn what a comma mistake looks like. And you need to show it sentences with good comma usage, so it learns how to fix comma mistakes when it finds them.
AI systems also need feedback from humans. When lots of users hit “ignore” on a particular suggestion, for example, Grammarly’s computational linguists and researchers make adjustments to the algorithms behind that suggestion to make it more accurate and helpful.
Just like people, AI does sometimes make errors. It’s especially possible when an AI is facing a situation it doesn’t have much experience with. Grammarly is trained on naturally written text, so it’s good at spotting issues that occur naturally when people write. It’s less good at handling sentences where mistakes have been deliberately inserted because they often don’t resemble naturally occurring mistakes.
Sources: Grammarly.com
That’s so interesting! I’ve been using Grammarly for the last couple of years and I’ve never wondered how it works. Well, now I know more. Sometimes, Grammarly shows me incorrect suggestions, however, I think it deserves more recognition. I’ve tried out many similar websites and services, but I still consider Grammarly to be the best one of them. (Even the free version)
I have never used Grammarly or likewise services, but I believe the situation here is quite similar with Google Translator. It used to be an object of ridicule when originally started, but over the years it had been improving, not the least thanks to ML(but that is topic for a whole another post) and now has reached the level of a pretty good human translator(mostly with English, other languages still experience some difficulties). So Grammarly, in my opinion, also has a bright future.
I always use Grammarly, and sometimes I can see it makes a few mistakes. It just shows that the editor/ proofreading jobs are still safe at the moment. For me, the question is: for how long?
Well, we live in times when technological progress makes more and more professions unnecessary, it is just the way of life. And usually it just benefits all the other people, like, for example self-order and self-service screens in fast food chains and supermarkets. As a customer I prefer to use them 100% of time, because it is much more convenient and leaves less possibilities for mistake or misunderstanding. But because of them, companies don’t need that much cashiers anymore, and thus many people were fired. Do I care? To be honest – no. Does it make my life easier? Definitely yes.
Grammarly is the best app that can help you in writing in English. I have been testing many apps that helped you with grammatical and writing errors. Grammarly is the best app so far.
I love this app! I used it many times when writing my assignments and it definitely helped me. I think that is the best application of this type because it was the only one that caught my errors so accurately (even for free). I’ve never wondered how Grammarly works so thanks for explaining it, it is so interesting!
Grammarly is definitely useful, using it even while writing this comment haha. For me it helps mostly with long writings where it’s harder to catch mistakes.
Although it often makes wrong suggestions and targets writing in passive voice as something wrong (idk why), as a user of Grammarly premium, I have to say it is quite helpful. Suggestions of their algorithm about the syntax, punctuation and delivery (choice of words) surely make writing more effective and help deliver the message more clearly.
Grammarly is a truly great and useful tool. Having some minor issues (as all technologies) it can be neccesity. Not being native speaker may be used as an excuse for making mistakes. However, there are some situations, such as formal writings, where even non native speakers should pay attention to gramma.