ESL Assistant News & Notes

... a modest goal ...

... 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

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.