coliblog

Today, we have released LanguageTool 2.0. Despite the version number, it's a normal release in our 3-month release cycle. As with most releases, much of the work is put into the XML-based error detection rules. As always, the detailed change log is available at languagetool.org/download/CHANGES.txt. There's now also an early release of a Firefox Add-on for LanguageTool which lets you check web page content and form content.

Misc items that have accumulated over the past months...

• LanguageTool 1.3 has been released
• LanguageTool participates in Google's Summer of Code 2011
• jwordsplitter, used by LanguageTool, is now available via Maven
• OpenThesaurus has a new layout. Also, there are now two Android clients. See twitter for up-to-date OpenThesaurus-related news.
• OpenStreetMap house numbers in Babelsberg (only a small part was contributed by me, though)

LanguageTool 1.1 has just been released. Besides many new error detection rules, it also contains a new version of jWordSplitter, a Java library to detect the nouns of which German compound words are made up. Unfortunately, the LanguageTool release took almost one year. Our plan is to have releases about every three months now - see our new roadmap. LanguageTool release announcements and news are now also posted to twitter.

Today, version 1.0.0 of LanguageTool has been released. So it took about six years from the first implementation in Python (whose version number I cannot remember) to today's release in Java. We fixed quite some bugs, added rules and also added support for three new languages: Danish, Catalan, and Galician. Actually, despite its version number, it's basically a common release.

The latest version of LanguageTool features the following changes:

• Fix for a NullPointerException that could appear when using paragraph-level rules
• Fixes for some bugs with pairing brackets
• Initial support for Icelandic
• More Dutch, English, Polish, Romanian and Slovenian grammar rules
• A new sentence tokenizer that uses the SRX format for specifying end-of-sentence breaks

LanguageTool 0.9.8 adds new rules for several languages (Italian, Romanian, Slovak, Polish, English) and fixes a crash bug. See the change log for details.

We just released LanguageTool 0.9.7. It includes some OpenOffice.org integration fixes and some updates to the error rules. On-thy-fly checking in OpenOffice.org should now be pretty robust (assuming you're using OpenOffice.org 3.0.1). As usual, you can find the details in the change log.

Die fleißige Community hat OpenThesaurus so erweitert, dass es seit heute mehr als 50.000 Wörter umfasst - verteilt auf 18.384 Bedeutungen. Passend dazu hat die Homepage endlich ein übersichtliches Design bekommen: www.openthesaurus.de

We've just released a new version of LanguageTool, the Open Source language checker. It should now work with OpenOffice.org 3.0 without crashing and it supports on-the-fly checking, as I explained in a previous blog entry. Other changes include: more rules for English and Polish and less (but still too many) false alarms for the German agreement checker.

Bei neun gleichzeitigen Tracks (Schedule siehe hier) kann man naturgemäß nur einen kleinen Teil der Vorträge mitbekommen, aber die von mir besuchten Vorträge waren doch sehr interessant. Es ging um Knowledge Managment mit Wikis, Recommendation Systems und die Vorstellung von Startups (z.B. aromicon, Zootool). Leider leidet die Akustik doch sehr, wenn sieben Vorträge in der gleichen Halle stattfinden, getrennt nur durch Stellwände...

Außerdem habe ich gelernt, dass es auch Brezeln ohne Salz gibt. Wenn man bedenkt, wie viel Zeit in unserer Volkswirtschaft durch das Abknibbeln der Salzkörner von Brezeln verloren geht (und es gibt doch wohl niemanden, der das Salz mitisst?), ist das ein echter Fortschritt und ein wichtiger Beitrag zur Lösung der aktuellen Finanzkrise.