Patent ID: 7664629

Claim:
A method of advising second language authors, the method comprising: receiving a proposed text in the author's second language with a processor; for at least a selected word of the second language text, with the processor determining a language model which represents a frequency of occurrence in a second language corpus and a corruption model which represents the probability that the user produced the selected word of text given that he in fact intended to use a candidate word, wherein the language model determining step includes determining with the processor: a plurality of the candidate words to be substituted for the selected word; and a language model probability based on the frequency of occurrence of the selected word; wherein the corruption model determining step includes: translating each of the candidate words from the second language to a first language of the author; determining a connecting route between the first language translations of the candidate words and the selected word, this connecting route explaining how the selected word might have been produced from the first language translations; and determining a probability for each candidate word based on the determined connecting route; and on a display device, displaying at least one of the candidate words based on the language model and the corruption model to improve the second language text.