coliblog

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.

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.

Recently, we've started community.languagetool.org, a new website that lets you browse all LanguageTool rules for all languages. The site also checks some Wikipedia articles, finding real grammar errors but also a lot of false alarms which need to be fixed gradually in LanguageTool. We're planning to add more features so that users can share their rules with other users. This way the website will hopefully some day deserve the "community" in its name. Of course, the site is still "beta" as every community-oriented website on this planet.

After a few months of silence, we have now released LanguageTool 0.9.2. It's now distributed as an *.oxt file - technically it's a ZIP file, but it carries meta information that allows to check for updates from the OpenOffice.org extension manager. Also, LanguageTool's menu entry has been moved to the "Tools" menu. If you try out LanguageTool and nothing seems to happen when you select the menu item, please check for its window in the background. This is a bug which we can, it seems, only work around by using the upcoming grammar checker API. As usual, please check out the change log for a complete list of changes.

My style and grammar checker LanguageTool has moved to its own domain, www.languagetool.org. The new homepage also features an online demo to try out most supported languages.

Some highlights of the new version 0.9 of LanguageTool:

• easier rule editing
• more rules for French
• initial support for Slovenian
• improved rules for Polish, English, and Spanish
• more powerful rule syntax
• recognition of German compound nouns ("Donaudampfschifffahrt" etc)
• support for disambiguation rules written in XML

See the changelog for details. The next version will hopefully make it even easier to write rules, you won't even need a programming environment anymore. Just edit the XML rules directly and test them.

A cross-site scripting security problem with the embedded HTTP server has been fixed. Error detection rules for Polish, English, and German have been improved (Marcin Milkowski has put a lot of work in the Polish rules). Initial support for Ukrainian and Czech has been added (although there's a bug in the release which makes LanguageTool crash with Czech -- but there are no rules for Czech yet anyway, just the framework to add them). Also, support for declaring phrases (or chunks) in rules is available now.

Get the release or have a look at the complete change log.