LanguageTool
| Company type | Open-source software; Freemium |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software |
| Founded | 2003 |
| Founder | Daniel Naber |
Area served | Worldwide |
| Products | Grammar, style, and spelling correction software; LanguageTool Premium |
| Parent | Learneo |
LanguageTool is an open-source and free application designed for grammar, style, and spelling correction, with all functionalities available for local installation. Additionally, its website provides access to LanguageTool Premium (previously known as LanguageTool Plus), a commercial offering that delivers more advanced error detection capabilities for English and German, along with enhanced editing features, operating under an open-core business framework.
Overview
Created by Daniel Naber in 2003 as part of his diploma project, LanguageTool was originally developed using Python and currently supports 31 languages. These languages are maintained by volunteers who are generally native speakers. The tool identifies mistakes through rule-based patterns evaluated on various texts. The main software is freely available for offline use. For certain languages, large 'n-gram' datasets are employed, which demand considerable computing resources; such processing occurs on servers via the web service. As part of its freemium approach, LanguageTool Premium utilizes these n-gram models.
Users can access the service through web browsers or integrate it via plugins compatible with Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, TeXstudio, Apache OpenOffice, Vim, Emacs, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Google Chrome.
Instead of performing full grammatical validation, LanguageTool focuses on detecting frequent errors by applying rules written in XML or Java. Users have the option to develop personalized XML rules through an online rule editor. Recent improvements have integrated extensive n-gram databases and artificial neural network technologies to refine suggestions for misspelled words.
In April 2023, Learneo acquired LanguageTool, broadening its range of AI-powered writing tools and solutions.