官方吐槽最致命。语法检查软件Grammarly还能不能用？看看CEO怎么说。

If you frequently Google language-related questions, whether out of interest or need, you have probably seen an advertisement for Grammarly, an automated grammar-checker. In ubiquitous YouTube spots, Grammarly touts its ability not only to fix mistakes, but to improve style and polish too. Over more than a decade, it has sprawled into many applications: it can check emails, phone messages, or longer texts composed in Microsoft Word and Google Docs, among other formats.

如果你常在谷歌搜索语言类问题，不论是因为兴趣或是工作需要，你都有可能看到Grammarly自动语法检查程序的广告。普天共用的油管 页中，Grammarly 称自己不仅能够修正语法错误，还能进行风格改善和语言润色。过去的十年里，Grammarly逐渐“入侵”各大应用程序：检查邮件、短信、Word文档、谷歌文档和其他各种格式文档的错误。

Does it achieve what it purports to? Sometimes. But sometimes Grammarly does not do what it should, and sometimes it even does what it should not. These strengths and failings hint at the essence of language and the peculiarity of human intelligence, as opposed to the artificial sort as it stands today.

它是否说到做到了呢？一阵一阵的。有时候好用，有时候也不干人事。这些优缺点共同展示了语言的本质和人类智能的特性，与它所 称的人工智能并不是一回事。

Begin with the strengths. In a rough piece of student writing, Johnson counted 14 errors. Grammarly flagged five. For example, it sensibly suggested inserting a hyphen in “post cold war [world]”. It spotted a missing “the” in the phrase “with [the] European economy”. And it noticed an absent “about” in “wondering [about] the state of Europe”. By using Grammarly, the author of this essay could have avoided some red ink.

On the other hand, Grammarly has a problem with false positives, calling out mistakes that are not. The other two suggestions are not disastrous, but neither did they relate to “critical errors” as Grammarly maintains. In the assertion that enlargement had “created a fatigue” within the European Union, Grammarly needlessly suggested deleting the “a”. In another error-ridden sentence, it recommended removing a comma, which fixed none of the problems. This false-positive tendency is not a deal-breaker for reasonably skilled writers who just want a second pair of eyes; you can dismiss any suggestion you like. But truly struggling scribblers might not know when Grammarly’s ideas would make their prose worse rather than better.

Then there are the false negatives, or the mistakes Grammarly fails to notice. Depending on the text, Grammarly can seem to miss more errors than it marks. The company’s chief executive, Brad Hoover, describes it as a “coach, not a crutch” — which sets expectations more appropriately than some of the ads do.

此外，Grammarly还有一些“破罐子破摔”的纵容，或者说，没有注意到的错误。基于不同的文本，Grammarly有时候会标注一些错误，漏掉更多错误。公司首席执行官Brad Hoover表示，这款软件于用户而言，更像是一位教练，而非挑错助理。这个评价反而比一些广告宣传的用词更加客观。

Artificial-intelligence systems like Grammarly are trained with data; for instance, translation software is fed sentences translated by humans. Grammarly’s training data involve a large number of standard error-free sentences (so it knows what good English should look like) and human-corrected sentences (so the software can find the patterns of fixes that human editors might make). Developers also manually add certain rules to the patterns Grammarly has taught itself. The software then looks at a user’s prose: if a string of words seems ungrammatical, it tries to spot how the putative mistake most closely resembles one from its training inputs.

All this shows how far artificial “intelligence” is from the human kind (which Grammarly wants to correct to “humankind”). Computers outpace humans at problems that can be cracked with pure maths, such as chess. Advances in language technology have been impressive in, for example, speech recognition, which involves another sort of statistical guess — whether or not a stretch of sound matches a certain string of words. One Grammarly feature that works fairly well is sentiment analysis. It can rate the tone of an email before you send it, after being trained on text that has been assessed by humans, for example as “admiring” or “confident”.

But grammar is the real magic of language, binding words into structures, binding those structures into sentences, and doing so in a way that maps onto meaning. And at this crucial structure-meaning interface, machines are no match for humans. Computers can prase sentences fairly well, labelling things like nouns and verb phrases. But they struggle with sentences that are difficult to analyse, precisely because they are ungrammatical — in other words, written by the kind of person who needs Grammarly.

但语法真的是语言的玄妙之处。语法将单词相互绑定成为一种结构，将结构串联成为句子，再通过句子表达意思。在这个关键的结构–意义交互中，计算机无法与人抗衡。计算机可以整理句子，以及标注动词名词。但计算机搞不定难以分析的句子，那些难以分析的句子就是不符合语法的句子。而写出这些句子的人，就是真正需要Grammarly的用户。

To correct such prose requires knowing what the writer intended. But computers do not work in meaning or intention; they work in formulae. Humans, by contrast, can usually understand even rather mangled syntax, because of the ability to guess the contents of other minds. Grammar-checking computers illustrate not how bad humans are with language, but just how good.

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