from Hacker News

How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker

by camillovisini on 1/26/21, 1:12 PM with 33 comments

• by mellosouls on 1/27/21, 12:24 AM

  For those unaware "Grauniad" is a decades-old nickname for The Guardian, used particularly by satirical mag Private Eye in reference to its reputation at one time for typos and the like.

  https://wordhistories.net/2017/06/05/origin-of-grauniad/

• by modernerd on 1/27/21, 1:15 PM

  When I saw “13,000 regexes” I thought of the adage, “the plural of regex is regrets”.

  But here it seems like a good choice to build on a battle-tested library of regrets, and it's clearly working well for them.

  The demo looks slicker than the typical Grammarly/MS Word/native macOS grammar and spelling corrections, for those who missed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl0nb94N98k&feature=emb_imp_...

  And the ability to flag false positives, send suggestions back, and see metrics of how the system's being used is just awesome.

• by jawns on 1/27/21, 12:38 AM

  As a college student (nearly 20 years ago) I built a tool for our student newspaper that caught frequent violations of the Associated Press style guide. Later, working as a newsroom copy editor, I was shocked at how few tools there were available to enforce style. Really awesome to see this Typerighter tool do it right.

• by teach on 1/27/21, 12:19 AM

  This is wonderful. I love to see technology enhancing experts' ability to do what they already do, but faster/more accurately.

  Also, I'm a big fan of regex. I think -- probably thanks to jwz's famous quote -- a lot of younger programmers avoid them but they're fantastic for MATCHING. Using them in a Google sheet is a killer MVP to prove out something like this.

• by chimprich on 1/27/21, 11:28 AM

  Whoever came up with the name "Typerighter" for this project should feel very pleased with themselves.

• by kimburgess on 1/27/21, 10:32 AM

  Relying on purely on regex misses so much context available from a document. I've been working on some tooling [1] in this space recently and a core epiphany was noting you can model written language as an AST and then reason about it in this form rather than opaque blocks of text (or flat, sequential text fragments as with Typerighter). An even better realisation was that others had already noted this too and built a mature ecosystem based on this concept [2].

  [1]: https://github.com/place-labs/orthograph-err

  [2]: https://textlint.github.io/

• by dtrizzle on 1/27/21, 7:09 AM

  This project reminded me a proselint, which appears to be a similar style checker. Sadly, that project appears to have been inactive for at least three years.

  https://github.com/amperser/proselint

• by mrkwse on 1/27/21, 1:26 PM

  I saw a journalist share Typerighter on Twitter and was intrigued, so I'm looking forward to reading this.

  It's a bit surprising that the engineering blog appears to be embedded in the main site, though. I've worked at a news org in the past (admittedly much larger) and the engineering/meta blogs were entirely separated from the main news section. Obviously it doesn't make sense to reinvent your stack, but I'm surprised the surrounding site scaffolding isn't at least distinct to show this isn't primary news output.

• by seanwilson on 1/27/21, 6:40 AM

  Is there a link to a list of the style rules their checker tests for?

  I've always felt automated checks + fixes for grammar and style are miles behind where they should be by now. Checking over and over e.g. long emails for problems before you send them is super time consuming, and that's not even considering help with tone and the overall message.

• by motohagiography on 1/27/21, 1:27 PM

  Funny, though I am unshocked that they have figured out a way to automatically generate cant.

  What does make it interesting is if it were applied as a GPT-2/3 module, and let loose as a reddit comment bot to train a model for engagement and provocation. Editors are essentially model supervisors, and if the object is to provoke and flatter people to sell advertising, it seems more like a compute problem to distill this process into a business.

  Human writers creating organic content aren't really necessary for that, and very soon we should be able to generate content and then attribute it to loyal personalities that we stand up as minor celebrities, not unlike the old Hollywood studio system from the early 20th century, where talent was well kept, but still very much kept.

• by lbill on 2/3/21, 9:18 AM

  Damn! That's the kind of thing my company could sell to its clients. And that's exactly what I'm going to tell my colleagues! Thanks a lot

• by melling on 1/27/21, 5:24 AM

  “ The rule application service is written in Scala, a common choice for Guardian backends”

  They even have a snippet of Scala code. I feel like HN must be the target audience

• by lindig on 1/27/21, 11:10 AM

  Software in the 21st century: to check a bunch of regex on a text you need: Grafana, APIs, services. Really? I'm surprised there is no k8s in here. /s

• by ggm on 1/27/21, 1:24 AM

  Grauniad and the fflong riots...