Writing assistance using machine translation techniques

• US 20070073532A1
• Filed: 09/29/2005
• Published: 03/29/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 09/29/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Brockett, Christopher, Dolan, William
• Granted Patent: US 7,908,132 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 40/58 Use of machine translation, e.g. for multi-lingual retrieval, for server-side translation for client devices or for real-time translation

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 an error contained in 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 of texts contains the error.

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

4. The method of claim 1, wherein providing an indication of an error 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 an error 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 an error comprises automatically applying a correction so as to transform at least a portion of the input.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein providing an indication of an error comprises presenting the user with a plurality of proposed substitutions that might be applied to remedy the error in the input.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein providing an indication of an error comprises evaluating at least one proposed remedy to the error relative to a target language model.

9. The method of claim 8, wherein evaluating said at least one proposed remedy 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 an error comprises providing a list of suggested substitutions that represent potential remedies for resolving the error.

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 an error 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 ill-formed 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 ill-formed 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 ill-formed texts relative to associated well-formed texts, the well-formed texts being in the same language as the ill-formed 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 generated by the user through a process of editing textual data.

19. The method of claim 17, further comprising receiving a user input indicative of a level of confidence with which the user is satisfied, the level of confidence being related to the likelihood that data in said collection is accurate.

20. The method of claim 17, wherein the collection of ill-formed texts and associated well-formed texts is created manually.