ESL Assistant News & Notes

ESL Assistant discontinued

2011-04-28T15:37:02Z

As of April 2011 the ESL Assistant service is discontinued. If you are interested in more information about the project, please see http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/msreslassistant/ for more details....(read more)

Current technical problems

2011-04-13T09:58:19Z

We are currently trying to regain access to our servers after an account expiration. In the meantime, unfortunately, we cannot perform some necessary steps to restore functionality to the site after a security update......(read more)

ESL Assistant API

2010-10-22T15:28:59Z

Several people have asked us about an API for ESL Assistant. We are actually planning on offering that (and on moving the service to the cloud), although it will take some months to get there, so please stay tuned!...(read more)

Silverlight 4 and pasting text into the ESL Assistant

2010-08-16T21:34:30Z

We had quite some interesting times with Silverlight 4 and lack of backward compatibility with the previous Silverlight version. Most of the issues are fixed, but as some of you pointed out it is currently not possible to paste text into the text box by right-clicking. The workaround is to use Ctrl+V to paste instead. Sorry about the inconvenience, we'll try to get this fixed as soon as we figure out what is going on....(read more)

New version with better coverage!

2009-11-13T19:47:00Z

A new version of the system was deployed today! What you should see is a good deal more suggested corrections where the system did not flag errors before. If you're interested in technical details: under the covers, our algorithm for finding good correction suggestions has changed substantially. We used to have some manually created heuristics that would combine evidence from multiple statistical models to determine whether a suggested correction should be shown. Now all these heuristics are gone...(read more)

Latest bug fixes and preview of upcoming changes

2009-08-21T21:33:00Z

After we deployed our new UI, we received some user feedback about truncated text passages when the Outlook plugin is used. It took us a while to figure out the details, but this problem should now be fixed. We also found some text rendering problems where the highlight and the actual text were out of sync, this has also been addressed in the newest version. Changes that will come soon include improvements in the example sentence selection and a bug fix that will increase the number of preposition...(read more)

The ESL Assistant Has a New Look

2009-08-03T23:39:00Z

The ESL Assistant, the MSR Natural Language Processing Group's prototype proofing tool for people who write English as a second or foreign language, has been given a makeover. Visitors to the site at http://www.eslassistant.com will now see a page that looks something like this: The new user interface requires Microsoft Silverlight™. Visitors to the page are prompted to download Silverlight if it isn't already installed on their machines. The new UI was developed and implemented in collaboration...(read more)

试试ESL助理

2008-09-05T21:57:00Z

工作以来几乎天天要用英语写点东西，但对很多用法还是没有底。于是我常常将一些吃不准的英语用法当作检索词，在互联网上看看是否有很多相同的用法。基于这些经验，我和微软研究院的同事们开发了一个英语自动校对原型系统，叫 ESL 助理。该系统的目标用户便是像我一样的，不以英语为母语的英语用户。ESL助理采用一些统计语言模型检测出英语书写中的问题并提出修改建议。用户可以通过该系统提供的互联网例句检索工具确认所提供修改建议。自己用了一下，感觉还不错。有兴趣的话，你也来试试。 ESL 助理 http://www.eslassistant.com/ 　使用之前一定先看看使用说明 http://www.eslassistant.com/Help.aspx 　目前， ESL 助理能纠正以下类型的错误冠词的插入和删除 You can use search engine as way to check spelling and grammar. We often go to movie theater downtown. 介词混淆 ...(read more)

... a modest goal ...

2008-07-15T01:05:00Z

... or (for those who understand the cultural reference here): all your errors are not belong to us. Well, we all (i.e. us non-native speakers of English, myself as a native German included) would like a tool that could just take what we write and turn it into grammatical and fluent English. Come on, how hard can it be? Bear with me while I try to explain why it's anything BUT simple. Note that this will be a non-technical post: if you have some knowledge of natural language processing you...(read more)

The Microsoft Research ESL Assistant Prototype is Live

2008-07-08T13:36:00Z

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. ...(read more)