In a bid to put an end to grammar woes and help improve writing, Google this week has rolled out an artificial intelligence-powered grammar checker, corporate web tools and services for G Suite users. Based on machine learning, this new grammar checker will understand not only the writer’s spelling mistakes, but will also suggest solutions to other nuanced grammatical errors.
In a blog post titled, Why so tense?, Vishnu Sivaji, product manager, G Suite, explained, “Using machine translation, we are able to recognize errors and suggest corrections as work is getting done… G Suite Basic, Business and Enterprise customers will start to see inline, contextual grammar suggestions in their documents as they type, just like spellcheck. If you’ve made a grammar mistake, a squiggly blue line will appear under the phrase as you write it. You can choose to accept the suggestion by right-clicking it.”
How It Works
When it comes to spelling, you can typically look up whether a word exists or not, in the dictionary. However, grammar is different, says Sivaji. “It’s a more complex set of rules that can vary based on the language, region, style and more. Because it’s subjective, it can be a harder problem to tackle using a fixed set of rules. To solve the problem, we use machine translation to build a model that can incorporate the complexity and nuances of grammar correction.
Using machine translation, we are able to recognise errors and suggest corrections as work is getting done. We worked closely with linguists to decipher the rules for the machine translation model and used this as the foundation of automatic suggestions in your Docs, all powered by AI.
In doing so, machine translation techniques can catch a range of different corrections, from simple grammatical rules such as how to use ‘a’ versus ‘an’ in a sentence, to more complex grammatical concepts such as how to use subordinate clauses correctly,” he wrote.
