Writing assistance using machine translation techniques

• US 20060053001A1
• Filed: 10/07/2005
• Published: 03/09/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 11/12/2003
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Brockett, Christopher, Dolan, William
• Granted Patent: US 7,752,034 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/9
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/253 Grammatical analysis; Style critique
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/279 Recognition of textual entities
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/44 Statistical methods, e.g. probability models
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/58 Use of machine translation, e.g. for multi-lingual retrieval, for server-side translation for client devices or for real-time translation
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99931 Database or file accessing

Abstract

A system is configured to provide writing assistance within a monolingual input environment based on statistical machine translation techniques typically utilized to translate from an input language to a different target language.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented method for providing writing assistance to a user, the method comprising:

automatically generating a mapping between two strings of text that are in the same language; and

providing, based at least in part on the mapping, an indication of a style transformation that could be applied to modify at least a portion of input received from the user.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein automatically generating a mapping between two strings of text comprises automatically generating a mapping between a first string of text and a second string of text, wherein one of the first and second strings is in a technical domain and the other is in a non-technical domain.

3. The method of claim 1, further comprising building a model of the style transformation based at least in part on the mapping.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein providing an indication of a style transformation comprises utilizing the mapping as a basis for analyzing content of the input received from the user.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein providing an indication of a style transformation comprises providing an indication of at least one substitution that can be applied to transform at least a portion of the input.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein providing an indication of a style transformation comprises automatically applying a modification so as to transform at least a portion of the input.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein automatically generating a mapping between two strings of text comprises automatically generating a mapping between a first string of text and a second string of text, wherein one of the first and second strings is in one dialect of a language and the other is in another dialect of the same language.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein providing an indication of a style transformation comprises evaluating at least one candidate style transformation relative to a target language model.

9. The method of claim 8, wherein evaluating said at least one proposed style transformation comprises evaluating relative to a target language model trained to reflect a collection of well-formed data.

10. The method of claim 1, wherein providing an indication of a style transformation comprises providing a list of suggested substitutions that each represent a potential shift from a first style in a first domain to a second style in a second domain.

11. The method of claim 10, wherein providing a list comprises providing a list ranked so as to reflect analysis relative to a language model trained based on a collection of well-formed data.

12. The method of claim 10, wherein providing a list comprises providing a list to the user so as to support a user selection process.

13. The method of claim 10, wherein providing a list comprises providing as input to an automated selection algorithm.

14. A computer-implemented writing assistance system comprising an alignment component configured to automatically generate a model of a style transformation based on a comparison of two strings of text that are in the same language.

15. The method of claim 14, further comprising a decoder component configured to process an input string and generate, based at least in part on information received from the alignment component, a list of proposed substitutions that potentially could be applied to transform the style of at least a portion of the input string into a well-formed string.

16. The method of claim 15, wherein the list of proposed substitutions comprises a list ranked so as to reflect analysis relative to a language model trained based on a collection of well-formed data.

17. A computer-implemented method for providing writing assistance to a user, the method comprising providing writing assistance based on an automated statistical comparison of a collection of source texts reflecting a first style in a first domain relative to associated target texts reflecting a second style in a second domain, the source texts being in the same language as the target texts.

18. The method of claim 17, wherein providing writing assistance based on a comparison comprises providing writing assistance based on a comparison of texts received through a computer network from a community of users.

19. The method of claim 17, wherein the source texts and the target texts contain no grammatical or spelling errors.

20. The method of claim 17, wherein the source texts are in a technical domain and the target texts are in a non-technical domain.