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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office Date: 07/17/2009

Proofing Tools in Office 2010

On Monday this week, Microsoft launched the Office 2010 Technical Preview. Thousands of customers...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office Date: 03/12/2009

The post I wrote a few months ago about how users can remove a word from the main dictionary of...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office Date: 03/02/2009

Hotfix für die deutsche Silbentrennung

Microsoft hat einen Hotfix für die deutsche Silbentrennung in Office 2007 veröffentlicht. Dieser...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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....

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office Date: 03/06/2008

Spellchecking ain't easy

A customer wrote to us recently with the observation that our English spellchecker doesn’t recognize...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office Date: 11/20/2007

There's a new blog out there from the team that's working on Enterprise Search for MOSS (Microsoft...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office Date: 10/24/2007

When Languages Die

James was talking about endangered languages the other day. I have just finished reading David...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office Date: 10/01/2007

Jonas Barklund is a veteran developer working on Windows Desktop Search. He’s got a great post with...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office Date: 09/27/2007

Smiley is 25

This week marked the 25th birthday of the smiley :-). But are emoticons really only 25? Language Log...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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. --...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office Date: 12/14/2006

Cool Blog on Localization Issues

Michael Kaplan has hundreds (maybe over a thousand) of posts on obscure details of...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office Date: 11/01/2006

Update: People Still Smarter than Computers!

Jonathan & Margaret over on the Word blog have some nice words about the contextual...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office Date: 10/31/2006

The Dutch spelling reform in Microsoft Office

[Une version en français de ce blog est disponible ici:...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office 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...

Author: Natural Language Group Microsoft Office Date: 10/19/2006

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