Artificial Intelligence

A spell checker for more than 100 languages in Microsoft Bing

Because of the number of searches with misspellings in the various languages, Microsoft Bing discovered that they were matching wrong documents and incorrect answers, making the user experience unsatisfactory.

Since it is important for the company to satisfy all users of its services, in addition to accessing accurate and cutting-edge correction, they are improving the search to include more languages from around the world, thanks to the help of the artificial intelligence system called Speller100.

While it is true that Microsoft has a correction system for many quite complex languages, it was not enough to satisfy users' searches in Bing, so they received wrong results or had to change the words used in their searches manually.

What does Speller100 accomplish? In addition to satisfying the user, Bing is becoming more inclusive for everyone by allowing quality corrections in over 100 languages and receiving a similar standard of correction to the original two dozen languages.

This has been made possible by recent advances in artificial intelligence, Speller100 is especially based on the theories of historical linguistics. Previously, taking into account users' opinions and comments on the web as autocorrection resources, the practice was really effective, until Microsoft detected that not all languages had a strong presence on the web, as well as few or no comments from users, so it became difficult to collect data for correction.

The key to Speller100's artificial intelligence system is that it learns to expand the corrections with little or no data, without categorizing or labeling that it learns for a specific language, being able to learn for German, Russian or Scottish at the same time.

Although it seems complex, Speller100 is already showing satisfactory results, the impact on the user experience is reflected in a reduction of up to 30% in searches with no results, and a reduction of manual corrections by the user by 5%.

Microsoft expects to expand this technology in many of its products, in addition to offering job openings for the search and AI team, hiring worldwide.

16 de Marzo, 2021