Netspeak

• Synopsis
• Demo and Web Service
• Project Outline
• People
• Related Publications

To write in a foreign language is a difficult task, even for an experienced author. Problems include choosing the right word or preposition in a given context, finding a wording which is commonly used, and avoiding the use of grammatical forms which reflect the author's native language. The Netspeak Web service assists authors to overcome these issues by using the World Wide Web as a source of common language. The service can be queried with short text phrases to determine their customariness on the Web. Wildcard characters can be added to the query to search for variations and synonyms of the query phrase, which will be returned as ranked list with respect to their occurence frequency on the Web. See a screencast that shows Netspeak in action.

Watch the Netspeak demo video.

Go to the Netspeak Web service.

Netspeak indexes the complete "Web 1T 5-gram Version 1" corpus as a source of common language on the Web. The corpus comprises about 3.8 billion phrases up to a length of 5 words (so-called n-grams) which were collected by Google from the English Web. The following table shows details on the size of the corpus:

• Martin Potthast (Scientific Mentoring and Software Architecture)
• Benno Stein (Scientific Mentoring and Statistics)

Students: Martin Trenkmann (Software Engineering)