Office Natural Language Team Blog
Want to give input on proofing tools? Participate in the Proofing Tools Survey!
We are currently running a survey on how users edit and review content and how they use proofing...
Date: 03/08/2010
Contextual spelling for French in Office 2010
At the Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans on 13 July 2009, we announced the launch of the...
Date: 07/17/2009
Proofing Tools in Office 2010
On Monday this week, Microsoft launched the Office 2010 Technical Preview. Thousands of customers...
Date: 07/16/2009
Add the Microsoft Translator to the Office Research pane
The Microsoft Translator from the Microsoft Research (MSR) is now available for download in the...
Date: 06/08/2009
Why is chef-d’œuvre my favorite French word?
In this post, I would like to share with you the reasons why I love the French word chef-d’œuvre...
Date: 03/12/2009
Natural Language Group blog featured in Language Tech News
The post I wrote a few months ago about how users can remove a word from the main dictionary of...
Date: 03/02/2009
Hotfix für die deutsche Silbentrennung
Microsoft hat einen Hotfix für die deutsche Silbentrennung in Office 2007 veröffentlicht. Dieser...
Date: 01/22/2009
A context-sensitive speller for Spanish in Office 2007
A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced an initiative targeting the Hispanic community, with special...
Date: 01/14/2009
An academic evaluation of the Office 2007 contextual spelling checker
A few days ago, I discovered an analysis of our Office 2007 contextual speller carried out by Prof....
Date: 01/08/2009
English Grammar Checker, Fragments, and Settings
A French translator was asking an interesting question the other day on the Word community...
Date: 10/22/2008
Can I remove a word from Office’s speller dictionary?
The other day, I was discussing a number of suggestions to improve Office’s spell-checker. A...
Date: 09/11/2008
Suggested improvements to Microsoft Word’s spell-checker
A few days ago, James wrote about the articles the Seattle Times published about our Natural...
Date: 09/04/2008
Natural Language Group in the (Local) News
Last week our group was visited by reporters from the Seattle Times, who took some photographs and...
Date: 08/28/2008
Lets Play Two?
For opening day this year, my beloved Chicago Cubs unveiled a statue of the immortal Ernie Banks. On...
Date: 04/03/2008
The Grammar Checker and Rain Man
Thinking about a couple of recent Language Log posts about grammar checkers, passive sentences, and...
Date: 03/06/2008
Spellchecking ain't easy
A customer wrote to us recently with the observation that our English spellchecker doesn’t recognize...
Date: 02/15/2008
Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac now supports the French spelling reform
Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac was released this week. Users who are interested in the French...
Date: 01/20/2008
Building corpora with the Live Search API
I just read Building and Exploring Web Corpora, which includes the Proceedings of the 3rd Web as...
Date: 12/21/2007
Untied Nations or United Nations?
During my vacation in December 2007, I had a chance to visit a friend of mine who works for the...
Date: 12/19/2007
MSR blog on the Microsoft Research Machine Translation system
Our colleagues from the Microsoft Research (MSR) group have started blogging about the statistical...
Date: 11/20/2007
New Blog on Enterprise Search
There's a new blog out there from the team that's working on Enterprise Search for MOSS (Microsoft...
Date: 11/16/2007
The French spelling reform in the Canadian press
For readers who are interested in the French spelling reform, two very recent articles published in...
Date: 11/10/2007
Contextual spelling: US English only?
Laurie asked us via the Email/Contact link: I was always under the impression that the Contextual...
Date: 10/24/2007
When Languages Die
James was talking about endangered languages the other day. I have just finished reading David...
Date: 10/16/2007
Fellow linguist blogger in Windows International
Kieran is a fellow linguist on the Windows International team, working closely with the team...
Date: 10/01/2007
Japanese Word Breaking in Windows Desktop Search
Jonas Barklund is a veteran developer working on Windows Desktop Search. He’s got a great post with...
Date: 09/27/2007
Smiley is 25
This week marked the 25th birthday of the smiley :-). But are emoticons really only 25? Language Log...
Date: 09/21/2007
On Endangered Languages
It turns out that here in Redmond we’re sitting in the middle of one of the global hotspots of...
Date: 09/21/2007
Some food for thought on offensiveness
Mark Liberman has an interesting post on the Language Log on judging offensiveness across languages...
Date: 09/13/2007
Windows Live Translator: Microsoft’s new Machine Translation web service
Our Microsoft Research (MSR) colleagues have just released the beta version of a brand-new machine...
Date: 09/13/2007
Are you interested in bilingual lexicography and learners' dictionaries?
I was recently invited to review a book on bilingual dictionaries for the July 2007 issue of the...
Date: 08/22/2007
German Spelling Reform (Die Spezialfälle der deutschen Rechtschreibreform)
Die neue deutsche Rechtschreibung bringt komplexe Bereiche mit sich in denen sich die Schreibweise...
Date: 08/15/2007
Word's post on using Word to improve your writing
"Can Word Improve your writing?" The Word team hopes so. And so do we! Heck, that's some of our...
Date: 06/27/2007
Want to create your own language custom keyboard?
If you are interested in getting output for other languages from a US English keyboard layout, here...
Date: 05/24/2007
Multilingual Options for the 2007 Office System Desktop
My colleague Adam Rosenblatt alerted me to an interesting document was recently posted to the...
Date: 03/28/2007
You say Arkansas'. I say Arkansas's. Let's write it into the law.
Recently the Linguistic Society of America highlighted an NPR report on a dispute among Arkansans...
Date: 03/22/2007
Accessing bilingual dictionaries in Office 2007
Bilingual dictionaries have been accessible for quite some time in Microsoft Office and the range of...
Date: 02/23/2007
Wow, more praise for contextual spelling
Thanks to Mike Calcagno for pointing this out.... See page 2 with the paragraph that starts with...
Date: 01/19/2007
Go Blue Squiggles! Mossberg praises contextual spellchecker
Some lovely words about the contextual spellchecker from Walter Mossberg's review of Office 2007 in...
Date: 01/04/2007
Office 2007 recognizes "truthiness" - Merriam-Webster's word of the year
Who says Office 2007 isn't hip? Your doc won't get flagged for any sort of "truthiness" in Word. --...
Date: 12/14/2006
Cool Blog on Localization Issues
Michael Kaplan has hundreds (maybe over a thousand) of posts on obscure details of...
Date: 12/11/2006
What other languages for proofing come with my version of Office?
When you buy the English version of Office 2007, you also get the ability to install proofing tools...
Date: 11/27/2006
More details on the Microsoft Office Multi-Language Pack 2007
Here are some more details on the Microsoft Office Multi-Language Pack 2007.... (Note, this is in...
Date: 11/16/2006
Shouldn’t we use the Office 2007 contextual speller when writing a news release?
It’s interesting to see how useful the new Contextual Speller feature in Office 2007 can be. If...
Date: 11/15/2006
You know who you are
A friend of mine, a university researcher, tells of a colleague whose students trusted the English...
Date: 11/13/2006
Natural Language Researcher assumes technical assistant post
Bill Gates announced last month that Joshua Goodman would be his new technical assistant. Joshua...
Date: 11/13/2006
Proofing Tools and Office 2007
A user was asking us the other day whether there was going to be a Proofing Tools 2007 kit, as was...
Date: 11/01/2006
Update: People Still Smarter than Computers!
Jonathan & Margaret over on the Word blog have some nice words about the contextual...
Date: 10/31/2006
The Dutch spelling reform in Microsoft Office
[Une version en français de ce blog est disponible ici:...
Date: 10/20/2006
Team tester finds Contextual Spelling success - in just plain old Office use!
I love CSS [Contextual Spelling]! I basically use spellcheckers to correct typing mistakes (I'm a...
Date: 10/19/2006