Launch of the Office Natural Language Team Blog

In an effort to connect with our customers, to provide teams outside of our own with more exposure to what we do, and to get feedback - we've decided to start this team blog.

What kind of features do we do? What sorts of information might you expect to be posted on this site? Well, our group is responsible for delivering a range of proofing tools to the Office client suite (e.g., Word) such as spellers, hyphenators, grammar checker, and thesauri. We also deliver many of the text analysis features that will be found in the 2007 Office Server release (e.g., SharePoint), including definition extraction and word breakers.

You can also expect to find articles in languages other than English. Many members of our team speak more than one language, being native speakers in Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, and French to name a few. Simply put, we all love Language which is why we work on this team. Many of us have degrees in Linguistics (not to mention Information Retrieval).

And of course, in the path of all these postings, we hope to get any insight or point of views that you may have surrounding our technology and how to improve.

Having a team blog site at Microsoft isn't new. There's a wealth of good information (and people to contact) on other team blogs such as the Office Live team, InfoPath team blog, and the Live Search team to name a few. Stay tuned!

-- Jay Waltmunson (Program Manager)