The Microsoft Research ESL Assistant Prototype is Live

The Natural Language Processing Group in Microsoft Research is pleased to announce that its ESL Assistant is now available on the World Wide Web via a link at http://www.eslassistant.com. A prototype writing assistance service designed for people who have learned English as a second or foreign language, the ESL Assistant uses statistical models to suggest corrections for a number of common learner error patterns that are not currently supported by the proofing tools in Microsoft Office products. The service also tries to help users judge the whether a suggestion truly represents an improvement by showing real-life examples returned by a web search. We hope that both learners of English and TEFL/TESL professionals will experiment with this service and find it useful.

It is our hope that this prototype will begin to fill a long-standing gap in Microsoft’s English language proofing tools. Every day, throughout the world, millions of non-native speakers write English at school or work, on blogs, or in personal e-mail, both to communicate with their counterparts from English-speaking countries, and as often as not, to communicate with each other. Writing errors made by learners are often different from those made by individuals who have grown up speaking the language, and can be complex and subtly contextual in ways that are not easily addressed by syntactic or lexical rules. For these reasons, ESL errors were not supported by Microsoft Office’s proofing tools when they were originally developed over a decade ago. Today, however, we are better positioned to address the challenge of providing writing assistance to this fast-growing segment of Microsoft customers. Modern statistical models and tools now allow solutions that were once impossible. In particular, our group’s Machine Translation effort has generated valuable spinoffs in the form of huge language models, fast statistical taggers and other tools that we have reused for this proofing work, and we are now beginning to bring these to bear on the task of grammar checking.

Source- MSDN Blog

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Tech today