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 their Office speller has been reprinted in the latest edition of Language Tech News (vol.2, No.4, February 2009), a publication of the Language Technology Division of the American Translators Association (ATA). Besides some technical details about how to use these “exclude dictionaries”, which the editor of the Newsletter felt would interest his readers, this post was a nice opportunity to show how the new contextual spellers in Office 2007 reduce the need that some users feel to exclude certain words from their speller dictionary.

This issue of Language Tech News also includes interesting articles on Trados’s translation memory technology, terminology management tools, font converters, and statistical machine translation (SMT). It is interesting to read the following comment about the Windows Live Translator, the MT system created by our Microsoft Research colleagues: « Perhaps the most successful MT application in the world today, the Microsoft Knowledge Base, used by hundreds of millions of users across the globe, is mostly a SMT-based effort » (p.17).

Thierry Fontenelle (Program Manager)