Frequently asked questions

Q. How do I use the ESL Assistant?
A. Follow the steps below, or watch a short demonstration:
  • Paste or type some English sentences into the text box. The ESL Assistant will look for possible problems in your writing and indicate them with wavy green underlines (squiggles).
  • If you point your mouse at a section of text with a wavy green underline, the ESL Assistant will display some suggestions. This indicates a place that you might want to take another look at. (What you wrote may not necessarily be incorrect.)
  • Move your mouse to highlight a suggestion; the ESL Assistant will now search the World Wide Web to find real examples, so that you can compare the suggestion with what you wrote. You can then decide whether the suggestion matches what you are trying to say.
Q. How do I use the Outlook plugin?
A. Follow the steps below, or watch a short demonstration:
  • Once you have installed the Outlook plugin, you can check an email that you are writing by clicking the ESL Assistant button.
  • Clicking the button will bring up the ESL Assistant web page, and copy the text from your email into the text box.
  • Use the ESL Assistant web page as described above, and when you are satisfied with your text, use the Copy button to copy it to your clipboard. You can then paste it back into the email you are writing.
Q. What is the Microsoft Research ESL Assistant?
A. The ESL Assistant is a prototype proofing tool that is being developed by the Natural Language Processing Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, with the goal of helping the several hundreds of millions of non-native speakers who write English every day around the world. The system, which is still experimental, uses state-of-the-art statistical tools and large-scale language models to identify possible problems in your writing and to suggest improvements that you can verify using automated searches on the World Wide Web.
Q. What does “ESL” stand for?
A. “ESL” stands for English as a Second Language, in other words, English for people whose native or primary language is not English. This is also referred to as English as a Foreign Language. Did you know that there are now more speakers of English as a second or foreign language in the world than there are native speakers?
Q. What kinds of corrections does the ESL Assistant make?
A. Currently the ESL Assistant tries to correct errors like the ones listed below. (Paste an example into the textbox to see how the ESL Assistant handles it.)
  • Article insertion and deletion:
    • You can use search engine as way to check spelling and grammar.
    • We often go to movie theater downtown.
  • Preposition confusion:
    • It can be found easily in everywhere.
    • This is the most direct way to prevent to criminals from doing more harm.
    • He relies by his friends too much.
  • Confusable adjectives:
    • She is very interesting in the problem.
  • Word order:
    • I bought a nice red big bag.
    • He is a my good friend.
    • I don't know what has he told the police.
  • Noun number:
    • I like to hike with friend at the weekend.
    • There are still many problems of pollutions.
  • Verb morphology:
    • Every line of code that I writed was rewrited.
    • We can succeeds if we try.
    • We might succeeded if we tried.
    • We could worked it out.
  • Auxiliary choice:
    • My teacher does is a great person.
    • To learn English we should be speak it as much as possible.
  • Gerunds and infinitives:
    • I encourage young people change their job.
    • By keep a hobby, he has something to do.
Q. Are you keeping what we send to the ESL Assistant? If so, what are you collecting, and how will it be used?
A. This site may collect the text you enter and information about the errors you correct and the clicks you perform on the site. This information is used for research purposes to help improve our products and services, analyze trends, and administer and improve the site. We are committed to protecting your privacy and will keep the data confidential. We will anonymize portions of the data, where possible, to protect your privacy. As with any information that is transmitted openly over the Internet, we do not recommend that you use the ESL Assistant to check confidential work or personal documents. Information about Microsoft's privacy policy can be found in our Privacy Statement.
Q. I know that there’s an error in what I wrote. Why didn’t the ESL Assistant find it?
A. The ESL Assistant looks for a small set of common error types, and your mistake may not be one of a kind that that it recognizes. In addition, the ESL Assistant only suggests changes when its statistical models are very confident that there is a problem, so that it doesn't annoy or overwhelm users.
Q. I put in a sentence that I know is perfectly good English, but the Assistant tells me that there's a mistake. Why?
A. Although we try to keep the number of false corrections to a minimum, our statistical models sometimes make mistakes. Also, the ESL Assistant may not yet do well on some types of prose, such as scientific or technical writing. You should regard the wavy underlines as indicating places to that you may need to review but that may not necessarily be mistakes. The web search function is there to help to help you decide.
Q. The ESL Assistant has told me that I've made a mistake, but the suggestion that it has made seems wrong. Why?
A. The system tends to find errors in places where it detects something that is a little bit unusual. It makes the best suggestions it can in the context, but may not always make the right selection. For example, it may suggest an alternative word, when the problem is actually a missing word somewhere else close by in the text. If a suggestion seems inappropriate and the web search does not help, you might try looking to see if you can find some other possible problem in that section.
Q. How can I tell if the web examples are good?
A. You can do a number of things to evaluate the web search results.
  • Look at the number of results: If the number of results for the suggestion is many times larger than what you wrote, then you may want to accept the suggestion.
  • Look at the text in the top sites: You may find that one of them is saying exactly what you want to say.
  • Look at the types of site: If the top sites seem to be professionally written, then they may be more reliable than if the sites contain ESL student diaries.
  • Look at the URLs (the web links): If the top sites are in non-English speaking countries, it is possible that the English may contain errors.
Q. The suggestion the ESL Assistant gave didn't produce any search results. Does this mean I should ignore the suggestion?
A. Not necessarily. The query that the system generated may have been be too specific. You can modify the query in the search box to include fewer words. We definitely encourage you to experiment.
Q. Why don't you provide explanations?
A. We believe that, for the most part, real world examples of usage that resembles the input and suggestions is more likely to be helpful than any amount of abstract explanation.
Q. What happens if I check the Skip Spell Check box?
A. A check mark in that box turns off the proofing tools that are used in Office 2007. We recommend that you keep this on so that you can check your spelling first. The ESL Assistant works better if your spelling is correct. However, the ESL Assistant will also catch some spelling and word formation errors that the Office proofing tools do not.
Q. What is the difference between the different colored squiggles underlining the words?
A. The blue and red wavy underlines (squiggles) are produced by the Office 2007 proofing tools. You can turn these off by clicking the check box on the page.
Q. Why can't I see search results for the blue and red squiggles like I can for the green ones?
A. We are working on that. Currently, no search results are generated for errors identified by the Office 2007 spelling and grammar checkers.
Q. Why can't I send my text directly back to the original document? Or better yet, have it checked inline in Microsoft Word?
A. The ESL Assistant is an experimental prototype that we have put out so that people can try it out. Integration with applications will come later.
Q. I lose my formatting. Can't you do something about this?
A. We will eventually support preserving formatting. But not just yet.
Q. Can I uninstall the ESL Assistant from the Outlook Ribbon?
A. Yes. Go to the Control Panel and find Programs (Windows Vista) or Add or Remove Programs (Windows XP). From there you uninstall the button from the ribbon. Look for ‘MSR ESL Assistant.’
Q. Will the MSR ESL Assistant work for all non-native speakers of English?
A. The Assistant targets writers who are fluent in English, but who still make occasional errors in grammar or word choice. This tool represents the state of the art in ESL proofing, but major sentence rewriting is beyond its current capabilities.
Q. English speakers make lots of errors too. Why are you just targeting non-native speakers?
A. Some of the mistakes that ESL Assistant catches are made by native English speakers as well. Since current proofing tools only target native speakers, the goal of this project is to provide proofing support for common errors made by non-native speakers. We expect that it will eventually be helpful to everyone.
Q. A web service is very slow and you need to be connected to use it. Why can't we download a client only version?
A. Running the ESL Assistant as a web service allows us to use huge statistical models to identify and correct errors. The functionality that you see in this prototype could not be implemented on today’s typical client machines.
Q. I found offensive content in one of the web links. Who can I contact?
A. The MSR ESL Assistant calls Live Search with IE7’s family filter turned on. Even so, any time you use a search engine you may encounter unexpected results. If the ESL Assistant itself has generated an inappropriate query to Live Search, we definitely want to know. You can use our feedback form to tell us about problems.

The Microsoft Research ESL Assistant Team