[kangalioo]

What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker?

In comparison to non-AI traditional tools, AI has the advantage of "understanding" the text, reducing the number of "stupid" mis-corrections. And its spelling correctness is usually already impeccable, so what is there to gain by interfacing it with traditional solutions, and how can it be achieved?

[Hizonner]

> What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker?

Don't do a stupid thing like that in the first place.

> In comparison to non-AI traditional tools, AI has the advantage of "understanding" the text, reducing the number of "stupid" mis-corrections.

I doubt it, but if that's true, run a normal spell checker, and then give the output to your LLM to filter.

> what is there to gain by interfacing it with traditional solutions,

About a billionfold improvement in compute efficiency, and a lower error rate.

> and how can it be achieved?

10 seconds of actual thought.

[trollbridge]

AI can’t really spell check without risking changing the meaning of sentences. Spell checking was a solved problem before this.

[applfanboysbgon]

Spellchecking is absolutely not a solved problem. I immediately disable spellchecking on every avenue it tries to approach because managing a bunch of dictionaries on every browser/device/application that has its own spellchecker for some godforsaken reason to not have squigglies spammed over every piece of jargon, slang, and slightly atypical spelling is incredibly annoying. I don't know how effective LLMs are, but it's difficult to imagine they can be worse than the existing regime, which is embarrassingly bad for the decades it's been around.

[quuxplusone]

An interesting idea I saw long ago in some book (I thought it was K&P's "Software Tools," or my second guess was K&R1, but neither of those panned out — a strong Mandela effect) was the clever idea of a whole-document spellchecker that works purely probabilistically, by histograms: you feed it a document, it tallies the trigraphs, and any trigraph that appears only rarely is flagged as a likely typo. This approach lets through unknown-but-realistic words like "antithematory" while flagging unrealistic words like "prisencolinensinainciusol" (because of its unlikely "ciu" and "ius" clusters) and "antthemaory" (because of "ntt" and "aor").

To make this approach work better, feed it a bunch of English text (or whatever language your document is in) before the document you really want to "spellcheck."

Essentially this isn't a spell "checker" so much as a spell "linter" — it looks for antipatterns statistically associated with bugs, and reports the patterns for further investigation.

If anyone knows where this trigraph-based "spellchecker" was first presented, I'd love to find out again.

[Barbing]

I like that. Might some of that logic have made it to consumer word processing programs?

[mattkrause]

That's uhh...a language model?

[serf]

It's a modeling of language, it's not structurally anything like an LLM.

[mattkrause]

It’s literally a trigram (character) language model. Check any NLP book from before 2015 or so.

LLMs have more stuff bolted onto them (embeddings, RLHF) but the autoregressive core is a direct descendent of that sort of language model.

[trollbridge]

It is structurally exactly the same thing as an LLM...

[murphyslaw]

You used to be able to add your own words to spellcheckers, somehow that went out the window. I rarely see the option for it on a red-lined word now in the context menu, and when it does adding the word seems to make no difference at all.

[PaulHoule]

Human copy editors are less than perfect too. I hired one copy editor who I could not trust to be the last person who touched a document before it went out.

I had a friend who wrote an article for the New York Times: the article made a lot of sense before she submitted it, but it was edited for length and style and it definitely read like a New York Times piece but didn't completely make sense.

[trollbridge]

You're talking about deployment, not the technical implementation of spellchecking itself.

I have been using reliable spellchecking since the 1980s.

[cyberax]

Try the LanguageTool. It's now good enough to show smelling pisstakes inside my IDE, including things like missing articles. Without creating tons of visual noise.

[NateEag]

I can agree that LLMs might yield better results overall than a standard spellchecker.

If your goal is to check your writing for plausibility and rough grammatical correctness, that's certainly an open problem for deterministic, conventionally-written software tools.

My goal with spell checking is to make sure my occasional mechanical typos while using a desktop computer get caught before someone else has the chance to be annoyed by them.

I don't have an issue with using the wrong word entirely when writing at a computer, so that's not a use case I think about. It does happen when I use a smartphone, due to autocorrect and predictive typing, but that's not a case this Claude skill applies to.

So, for my use case, the ~6 orders of magnitude more energy used to send documents over the network to be hyperchurned on an array of GPUs guzzling electricity is pure waste.

It also makes the whole process orders of magnitude _slower_.

I find that massive waste and slowdown infuriating, even while conceding that it can perhaps deliver a little more value then the deterministic spell-checking algorithms I rely on.

[trollbridge]

A problem with LLM-based spell checking is that it can alter the actual meaning of the sentence in its quest to improve the spelling. This is a fairly hard problem to fix.

[wat10000]

Only if the problem is declared to be whatever it is that spell checkers solve. As the classic joke goes, "Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken."

[xoa]

>Only if the problem is declared to be whatever it is that spell checkers solve.

The problem being misspelling, hence, "spell checker". Like, this seems pretty straightforward? Grammar checking if you cannot use the language properly is a pretty different problem space, and indeed has long existed and is exposed as a separate thing. And not just in fancy word processors either, if you go to something as simple as macOS TextEdit you'll see separate check boxes for "Check spelling as you type" vs "Check grammar with spelling". If someone wants to try out using LLMs for grammar no problem, but spell checking is purely about the mechanical and, importantly, deterministic aspect of typos or outright non-words.

>As the classic joke goes, "Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken."

There is a genuine touch of irony/meta in you using that here in this context. That sentence has no misspelled words, and importantly gets across the exact humorous meaning the human who wrote it intended. The joke literally only works because a human was able to make creative use of language. If you had an LLM agent posting for you to HN and it automatically changed that to:

>As the classic joke goes, "My spellchecker works great but could use some grammar checking."

Well, where would the joke be now!? This goes to the exact concern people have with powerful non-deterministic meaning-changing tools replacing deterministic meaning-preserving ones.

[applfanboysbgon]

I just fed this entire thread (excluding your comment pointing out the joke, and the text mentioning that it was a joke) to an LLM, and it did better than the dictionary spellchecker: corrected one real error, left my "squigglies" alone which was attacked by squigglies with the old-hat spellchecker, and specifically noted, without any prompting in that direction, that it left the joke spelling unchanged. It did not rewrite any sentences. I'm all for determinism where deterministic tools work, but the current implementations are so bad I can't blame people for turning to a non-deterministic program if it's still better on average.

[xoa]

LLMs don't seem to be doing a very good job of clarifying your basic thinking however, in this post or your earlier one. To reply to both:

>I immediately disable spellchecking on every avenue it tries to approach because managing a bunch of dictionaries on every browser/device/application that has its own spellchecker for some godforsaken reason to not have squigglies spammed over every piece of jargon, slang, and slightly atypical spelling is incredibly annoying.

But this is a logic fail is it not? LLMs are irrelevant to this. Your stated problem is "not all software/devices I use has a single shared dictionary/grammar tool to my preferences". That's a very, very reasonable complaint. I agree with you that it's always been tremendously irritating that so many applications won't even make use of operating system dictionaries but rather recreate their own, really that the entire infrastructure around spelling or grammar dictionaries is so primitive.

But how do you think LLMs help? Even setting aside quality concerns they don't magically retroactively make every software/device use them, they're just another tool in the space something could use, or not. So you're still stuck with the exact same problem. You still don't have something sync'd/shared universally across your entire experience. I can see how you could just live within some single environment to avoid that (do everything in a browser, use the same browser company's products across platforms with sync supported, so you can use the browser language tools for everything), but again that's not unique to LLMs. That approach would work for conventional tools as well.

>I just fed this entire thread to an LLM

This is a second logic fail. The entire point and meaning of "non-determinism" is precisely that you can't just do something once and then have that be evidence. If we all did the "same thing", feeding every thread to an LLM, thousands of times we wouldn't all get identical results every time. Sometimes we'd get something else. And the very fact it's rare is one of the core challenges of this entire space, because humans are very, very bad at dealing with things where it works 99% of the time and fails 1% of the time. This has always been true.

[applfanboysbgon]

> But this is a logic fail is it not?

It is not. The LLM approach is not dependent on system configurations. You can expect that it probably works the same from any device or application, because it can surmise slang/jargon from training and context rather than needing to be fed every little individual case as a per-user configuration. There are advantages to making a program more sophisticated than a literal == check against a list of pre-programmed words.

And even if there were an easy and satisfying way to unify dictionaries cross-device, it still wouldn't be a pleasant experience. That first time adding every single jargon term you use is not enjoyable. If there was a solution that just... didn't require that, it would solve a problem current spellcheckers do not solve. And what do you know, it appears there is one!

> This is a second logic fail.

Saying things are logic fails doesn't make them logic fails, all the more so when the failure is your own reading comprehension. I explicitly noted that non-determinism doesn't need to be flawless, only better than the deterministic solution on average. If the non-deterministic error rate of LLMs is below 1%, that still puts it far, far, far ahead of the deterministic tool's error rate.

It may be possible to create a deterministic tool that is better on average, but I haven't seen one. The current tooling is so fucking horrendously bad that after decades they cannot handle pluralising any uncommon word that is pluralised with "ies", for example squiggly is recognised and squigglies is not. That is fucking shamefully bad technology.

[wat10000]

It's not clear whether using "grate" instead of "great" is a grammar mistake or a spelling mistake. I'd argue it's a spelling mistake. The intent was not "my spell checker works a frame of metal bars," it was "my spell checker works well." It just so happens that the misspelled word matches a different word.

An example of a sentence like this with correct spelling but bad grammar would be "my spell checker works good." All of the words are what they're meant to be, but the last word is not the correct part of speech.=

But because computers are good at detecting "this doesn't match any known word" and bad at detecting "this matches a word but isn't the word you meant to use here," we've redefined "spell checking" to mean "find words that don't match any known word."

Your point about the joke is not correct. If I put my comment into ChatGPT and ask for a grammar check, it recognizes that it's a joke with deliberately bad grammar and suggests leaving it alone. If I put my comment into a grammar checker, it flags multiple errors in the joke. And "deterministic meaning-preserving ones"? Traditional spell/grammar checkers may be deterministic, but at no point have they ever been guaranteed to preserve meaning, or even been particularly good at it.

[xoa]

>It's not clear whether using "grate" instead of "great" is a grammar mistake or a spelling mistake.

It actually is clear, because words have meaning. "Spelling" refers specifically to the order of letters forming a given word [0, 1]. The proper use of words with a sentence, the "the study of the classes of words, their inflections, and their functions and relations in the sentence" [2] is the definition of "grammar"!

>I'd argue it's a spelling mistake.

Perhaps so, you're welcome to invent your own special snowflake definitions for words without much relation to decades/centuries of usage. It's a free country. But I would and will argue you are incorrect to do so and then expect to communicate with other humans.

----

0: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spell

1: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/spell

2: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grammar

[wat10000]

> "Spelling" refers specifically to the order of letters forming a given word

Right. And "the given word" in that particular example means "well" and is spelled G R E A T. G R A T E is a misspelling of that word.

Your position doesn't make any sense when you boil it down. I write some word as some sequence of letters. Whether it's correctly spelled depends not only on how that word is spelled, but how all other words, completely unrelated, are also spelled?

Let's say someone meant to write "bite" but wrote "byte" back in 1950. That's a misspelling. Did it retroactively become a grammar error when the word "byte" was coined in 1956? Or does the word have to exist at the time of writing for it to be a grammar error instead of a spelling error?

It's a lot more consistent if you consider the spelling relative to the word that's supposed to be there and accept that computer spell checkers miss the case where a misspelling happens to match a different word.

[intrasight]

If it's a solved problem, then why does my iPhone suck at it?

[trollbridge]

Maybe it has a poor implementation.

aspell works great. Back in the day I used some IBM employee written software on DOS that was a TSR that would spell check words for you in popular editors. In the 1990s every word processor had a decent spell checker. They all had the ability to add your own additional words.

[NateEag]

Agreed, aspell is noticeably better than many of the others I've used over the years.

I suppose poor implementations of boring old deterministic spell-checking are a thing, too.

Maybe that's some part of the disconnects in this thread.

[bityard]

Strong disagree. One of the core strengths of LLMs from the beginning is that they are very good at NOT changing meaning, as long as your model isn't so small that it starts to get "dumb" and as long as your input fits in the context window. (Two known limitations that aren't always exposed to the end user in poorly-written applications.)

Of course, LLMs are non-deterministic and do occasionally make mistakes, so you have to use them correctly and review their output. You shouldn't paste a doc into the web UI and tell it "fix all the mistakes and write the output to a new file." You should instead have it present each mistake and fix to the user as a diff and let the user approve or deny, either within the application or allowing the user to make their own edits. Never let it "rewrite" the whole document, that's the document-editing equivalent of giving OpenClaw root on your personal computer. Nothing good will come of it.

Classic spell checkers can't detect homophones. E.g. "there" and "their." Grammar checkers can, but at least the ones that I have used also like to change the tone of my writing to sterile corporate PC speak. LLMs used for grammar checking have not, in my experience, meddled with my tone. (Although sometimes they try to admonish me for it!)

[dragonwriter]

> Grammar checkers can, but at least the ones that I have used also like to change the tone of my writing to sterile corporate PC speak.

Most grammar checker packages also include style checking, and the default options tend toward that style (because that’s the big market for them.) Most of them are also configurable, so you can disable style checking entirely while still checking grammar, or tweak which style rules are applied.

[jlarocco]

>What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker?

You just don't need AI to do spell checking. It's a waste of energy, bandwidth and tokens. It's like Java Enterprise Fizz-Buzz - 1000x more complicated than it needs to be and complete overkill.

But at least you can tell your manager you're using AI!

[saynay]

AI certainly is the shiny new hammer, and it is tempting to see the world as nails.

Traditional methods might not be perfect, but they also easily fit in the memory of even low power devices. Perhaps it isn't a problem worth burning a dollar of tokens for every spelling mistake.

[sarchertech]

The fact that it produces correctly spelled words says nothing about it’s ability to find spelling mistakes or to correct them without errors like completely changing the word.

[allears]

You mean errors like misusing "it's" when the right word is "its?"

[ceejayoz]

I am skeptical that AI brings any benefit to spell checking at all.