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Comment by foundart

4 months ago

In comments on an article about spellchecking no less

In this case, both fair and fare are words in English. Which shows that spell checking needs to know a lot about grammar and context to work in general. Basically you need an LLM. Or if not a 'large language model', perhaps at least a small language model.

  • I wonder how it does work, I remember MS Word having a fairly decent grammar checker when I was using it in school - which predated LLMs by many years!

    I suspect an LLM wouldn’t be the most optimal choice

    • Depends on what you mean by 'optimal'. Ie what are you optimising over?

      In terms of 'can I run it locally on an early 2000s machine?' LLMs are definitely the wrong choice.

      In terms of 'what can I quickly hack together in 2025 regardless of variable cost?' LLMs might be the right choice.

      > I wonder how it does work, I remember MS Word having a fairly decent grammar checker [...]

      You can get pretty far with some lookup tables and some heuristics.