Can AI Really Improve Your Writing?
30 grammar checkers, 40 mistakes — who’ll win?
“For the most part, accepting the advice of a computer grammar checker on your prose will make it much worse, sometimes hilariously incoherent.” — one well-known linguist said in 2007. With the advent of neural networks and artificial intelligence, the landscape of automatic proofreading has changed dramatically.
There’s a vast number of grammar checker comparison articles that thoroughly describe their features, prices, and ease of use [1-3]. But when it comes to quality, the reader is left with the unproved allegations that ‘grammar checker A is better than grammar checker B by X %’.
No one has seriously taken the task of benchmarking grammar checker tools from the users’ perspective.
There is a good 2012 article called ‘Advanced Spellcheckers Compared: Ghotit, Ginger and Oribi VeriSpell’ [4] that focuses on spelling, but in 2022, grammar checks would be expected as well.
Then there’s a recent one from 2020 called ‘An In-Depth Comparison of 14 Spelling Correction Tools on a Common Benchmark’ [5]. Though it has limited coverage of grammar mistakes, it is also primarily focused on spelling. Also, it is mostly intended for the creators of such tools: the author builds two neural networks himself (LSTM and…
