Microsoft Natural Language Understanding System and 
Grammar Checker 
Steve Richardson 
Microsoft Research 
One Microsoft Way 
Redmond, WA 98052 
steveri @ microsoft.com 
The Natural Language Processing (NLP) 
group at Microsoft Research has been 
working for over five years on the 
development of a broad-coverage NL 
understanding system. In the last two 
years, the NLP group has been joined by 
the World Languages Research group, 
whose current mission is to extend the 
NLP group's technology to both 
European and Far-Eastern languages, 
and by the Natural Language 
Development group, which is 
responsible for transferring the 
technology into Microsoft products. 
The presentation will provide a brief 
overview and demonstration of the 
components that comprise the Microsoft 
NLP technology, including the syntactic 
parser, logical form component, and 
lexical knowledge base (MindNet). 
There will also be a description of how 
the three NL groups at Microsoft have 
collaborated successfully to move the 
technology into real world products. 
In particular, the grammar checker 
integrated in Microsoft Word 97 (also 
included in Office 97), which was 
released in January of this year, 
incorporates the NLP group's syntactic 
parser. It is envisioned that this very 
general and flexible component, together 
with the other components under 
development, will provide the basis for 
many NL-enabled functions as well as 
specific applications other than grammar 
checking. 
The grammar checker will be 
demonstrated in the context of Word 97, 
showing a number of the errors it detects 
and some of the rewrites it suggests. 
Some usability and integration issues, 
such as background processing, will also 
be discussed. Finally, there will be a 
brief demonstration of the grammar 
checking functionality in the context of 
the more general NL understanding 
system. 
Publications describing the work of the 
NLP group at Microsoft Research may 
be accessed on the World Wide Web at: 
http://www.research.microsoft.com/ 
