• You can deeply focus on your thoughts and the value you provide while writing. Without the rewriter, you’d be interrupted with your own thoughts about more suitable synonyms or ways to enhance your copy.

• You spend less time editing because the rewriter helps you make your sentences clear and nativelike as you type.

• AI and machine learning are now able to create amazing content that is indistinguishable from human one. There are even articles written by robots! The rewriter is no exception.

Technology doesn’t stand still and neither does Linguix. The updated rewriter has shown significant and measurable improvements. Let’s discuss how our team has achieved these results and define various metrics that have helped us to provide a more sophisticated experience in Linguix Rewriter 2.0.

Metrics to Determine the Quality of Linguix Rewriter

The Bleu Score. The Bilingual Evaluation Understudy score, or BLEU for short, is a metric for comparing a generated sentence to a reference sentence. This metric evaluates the quality of the machine learning translation.

In fact, the closer the value to 0, the better. It implies that the rewriter generates “smarter” results, and chooses synonyms that retain initial meaning. 

The Jaccard similarity coefficient is a measure used in understanding the similarities between sample sets. As with the BLEU score, the appropriate Jaccard Index value tends to 0. Again, the closer to 0, the better the results.

Language-Agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding (LaBSE) and Cosine similarity. 

The LaBSE model encodes text into high dimensional vectors so that the text vectors close in meaning are geometrically close to each other (they’re placed into a shared multi-dimensional vector space).

Cosine similarity, in turn, helps to define how similar the pieces of text are. It measures the cosine of the angle between two vectors projected in this space. The closer the cosine value to 1, the smaller the angle and the greater the match between vectors.

Perplexity. Perplexity is a metric used to evaluate how good a language model is. The lower the perplexity score is, the better the language model works in terms of word prediction. 

How We Conducted the Training

We took 11 datasets with 573,228,310 million sentences in various styles (from technical documentation to fiction) and trained our model. The goal was to make it able to handle texts of different types and styles. The one-to-one/one-to-many column represents whether the source sentence has one paraphrase option or several.

The Results

The quantitative analysis of our new model represents a higher quality of the paraphrasing generation compared to the previous model. The new model outperforms the old one in terms of text similarity: 

The BLEU score: 0.47↓ vs 0.65

The Jaccard similarity coefficient: 0.45↓ vs 0.51 

Perplexity. Rewrites generated by Linguix rewriter 2.0 appeared to be more natural and native: 0.26↓ vs 4.99

The semantic similarity value of the new model is slightly lower than that of the previous model (0.80↓ vs 0.93), which is totally fine. The model generates a variety of options using other words but keeping the meaning of the source text as its target.

As such, for Linguix rewriter 2.0 we were able to improve the quality of the rephrased content while keeping the text meaning at the same level.

How to test the updated rewriter 

You need to install Linguix browser extension or use Linguix web editor.

The post How To Measure the Quality of the AI-based Rewriter: Our Experience appeared first on Linguix Blog.

As a result, typos or grammar mistakes often go unnoticed. And this problem has seemingly become a daunting one in corporate communications—there’re even lists of commonly misspelled words. 

But the main question is: do typos in correspondence really affect your business?  

According to Linguix’s fresh research, the answer is: yes, they do. Read on to learn how exactly and what you can do to minimize the negative effects.

Methodology

We have conducted a survey among 50,000 subscribers of our email newsletter. The respondents mostly hold sales, marketing, IT, and management positions. 

In our survey, we asked a number of questions concerning people’s reactions to grammar mistakes and typos in the email subject line as well as in its main text, and whether they would like to continue doing business with a person who makes such mistakes.

Key takeaways

First, we wanted to figure out how mistakes or typos in the subject line affect the email open rate. It turned out that most respondents (75.4%) will still open such an email. However, a significant part (24.6%) consider an erroneous title a sound reason not to read the email. 

Then, we asked the respondents if they usually reply to emails containing grammar mistakes and/or typos. The majority (73.7%) said they do, but there was also a large portion of those who don’t (26.3%.) This means each time your employee sends a message with grammar mistakes, almost a quarter of potential leads are cut off straight away. Quite a bit!

Another important question we posed was whether our subscribers would even do business with a person who sends them emails with grammar mistakes. And while 46.6% of the respondents didn’t consider this to be a problem, the majority of 53.4% were negative about the possibility of further cooperation. 

Quick tips

As we can see, the issue of grammar mistakes in email correspondence is serious enough to hamper your business development. What can be done to improve the situation?

• Finding additional time for employees to review emails before sending them. In some cases, this will entail a reduced number of emails sent per day; however, in the long run, more qualitative messages might yield better results than the mere quantitative approach.
• Using email templates can help avoid mistakes in the subject line. But then, it’s crucial to make sure the template is 100% correct, otherwise, the mistake will be multiplied many times before it’s finally noticed. 
• Adopting a writing assistant solution like Linguix can help dramatically reduce the number of typos and grammar mistakes: it takes just a few moments for an employee to correct them based on suggestions. Besides, such assistants are also capable of eliminating the language barrier when it comes to internal communications. 
• Introducing a corporate style guide can both decrease the number of mistakes and help maintain the optimal tone of voice, which is another important factor in brand communication. 

Email communication is one of the primary sales and marketing channels for many companies, and given the high price of typos and grammar mistakes, this issue is really worth addressing! 

The post How Grammar Mistakes Affect Email Communication: a New Survey appeared first on Linguix Blog.

It’s widely believed that non-natives who speak English fluently are better accepted and earn more in the US. One of the things that can help them sound more native, at least, when it comes to the written language, is AI writing assistants. 

No wonder that these solutions are getting more and more popular these days: according to Dataintelo, the AI Writing Assistant Software market is anticipated to grow at an average rate of 28% during the forecast period, from $1,2b in 2021 until 2028. 

To better understand how English proficiency affects employee performance, we have conducted a survey. Here’s what we have found.

Methodology

To compile the report, Linguix’s team analyzed data from 2146 respondents, of whom almost 73% were non-native speakers. 

We asked them a number of questions concerning their English language skills with regard to their work performance and communication with colleagues.

Key takeaways

90% of all the respondents think English writing skills directly affect their career. This is not surprising given the fact that a big deal of work communication now occurs through email correspondence or via messengers. 

Over 54% of respondents have experienced a language barrier in the workplace. Which means, more than half of the employees might be underperforming due to linguistic issues—but this can easily be avoided if necessary measures are taken.

What’s more, 60% of English-natives have struggled to communicate with non-native coworkers in writing. So, obviously, the lack of English language skills concerns most of the team, not only non-natives themselves.

What can companies do?

Finally, we’ve asked the respondents whether they think their employers need to take any steps to improve the situation.

The overwhelming majority agree that companies should help non-native employees  improve their writing skills. Which means, it’s in the employer’s interests to provide employees with the necessary training and tools, such as an AI writing assistant. 

For example, Linguix offers a universal solution for businesses for just as little as $50 a month. It includes all the necessary writing enhancement tools as well as some additional options like content templates (shortcuts), secure secret mode and a profound analytics module.

Final thoughts

As our survey has shown, language barriers are real and can significantly hamper employees’ performance and work communication. To deal with this problem, companies should pay more attention to providing non-natives with all the necessary training and tools to help them improve their skills. At Linguix, we’re committed to making that task easier for whole teams by offering AI-based solutions that empower your employees to make the most of their written communications.

The post Language Barrier in the Workplace: a New Research by Linguix appeared first on Linguix Blog.

Companies across multiple industries have been striving to boost diversity among their teams for decades. However, many leaders have realized that more can be done in terms of inclusivity. One of the most apparent parts of these efforts is promoting inclusive language in corporate communications, both internal and external. Unfortunately, multiple negative effects may be caused when employees use inappropriate language in their written communications, from linguistic racism to gender bias. 

In response to the rising problem, companies have started to deploy various solutions. As such, CVS Health enforced conscious inclusion workshops, Google began to nudge users to adopt the gender-neutral language, UK Finance, EY, and Microsoft launched an inclusion campaign.

In addition to any educational activity, many companies have introduced style guides, a set of standards for the writing, formatting, and design of documents, to eliminate using any gender-related descriptions of notions that have non-gender-related synonyms.  

Linguix Style Guides is a feature used by thousands of businesses worldwide. Today, we publish aggregated and depersonalized statistics that show what topics companies are covering in their style guides.

Disclaimer: no personal data was analyzed or accessed during the research. We’ve analyzed technical information and metadata on style guides rules and their activation only.

Methodology

We have 4156 style guides on the platform that took part in the research. We’ve analyzed the frequency of rules met in style guides. No content created by customers and their employees were analyzed as we do not store this data.

Based on the research, we were able to come up with three categories of the style guide rules enforcing:

• non-discriminatory language,
• correct branded language,
• proper English dialect usage (Mostly enforcing US spelling).

Here is what we’ve found by analyzing this data.

Key takeaways

Non-discriminatory language turned out to be the most popular purpose of corporate style guides (37% of guides covered this topic), while correct brand language enforcement was the #2 priority (21% of style guides solved this task). Also, many style guides administrators require their employees to use the correct English dialect, primarily enforcing US spelling (17%).

Most companies use Linguix to monitor external communications with customers, but some also use it internally to discourage employees from using the unwelcomed words in emails or Slack messages. That might mean avoiding gender-biased wording, prodding employees to think twice before they refer to a diverse group of people as “guys” instead of “team,” or use gendered words like “manpower” instead of “personnel” in their outgoing communications.

Here are some frequently used style rules focusing on gender-neutral language:

• businessman → businessperson, entrepreneur
• guys → team, everybody
• manpower → staffing, workforce, personnel, human resources
• foreman → supervisor
• middleman → contact person, go-between, broker, intermediary
• sister company → company, partner company, associated company
• man on the street → average person, ordinary person
• lady doctor → doctor

What else: brand safety

During the past year, we’ve also launched a bunch of demo projects helping the businesses worldwide to set up Linguix and create style guides for them based on the corporate requirements. Here are some interesting style guide use cases from such demos:

• One client in the IT industry used Linguix Style Guides to deter its employees from using the word “digitalization” to avoid sounding distant and too corporate.
• Also, companies try to remind their employees not to use political and national-related terms. For e.g., during Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh conflict escalation in 2021, some companies added the name of the disputed region to their style guides as a term to avoid.
• One Asian bank enforces its employees to use the People’s Republic of China instead of China and instead of Hong Kong – Hong Kong, China. Another style guide bans writing about Jammu and Kashmir to control geopolitical risks.  

Final thoughts

Our goal here at Linguix is to help our corporate users to communicate in ways that indicate competence and confidence at work. We believe that using Style Guides can help businesses to build healthier connections with their customers, and boost team morale by ensuring everyone within the company is happy with internal communications.

The post How Companies Use Linguix Style Guides: Inclusive Language, Correct Corporate Terms, Brand Safety appeared first on Linguix Blog.

These ten languages, unsurprisingly, are the most spoken globally, and that means they have the biggest number of speakers who claim the language as their mother tounge (we will address the numbers of non-native speakers later). So, what are the most-spoken languages in the world, and how many people actually speak them?

Although ranking them is a relatively simple process, ascertaining the exact number is a little more difficult due to the fact that there is not always accurate data. There is another issue too: sometimes it is extremely difficult to characterize what a language is when actually, a term might include a whole host of dialects that belong to the same language family (Chinese and Hindi are examples of this). 

We begin with the most-spoken languages in terms of the number of native speakers, with a list featuring all speakers coming after. Finally, we have complied a quick list of the top ten languages by the number of countries that have that language as their officially-recognized tongue (or one of).

All numbers here are provided by Statista

The World’s 10 Most-Spoken Languages By Native Speaker

1. Standard Chinese — 1.311 billion native speakers

There are two major caveats here. The first is that as with all of these numbers, it is very hard to be precise. The second is the fact that Chinese itself is not a single language, but a catchall name for a number of different languages spoken in China and Taiwan.  

“Standard Chinese is the official language in mainland China, as well as in Taiwan, and is also known as Standard Mandarin or Modern Standard Mandarin. The language is a standardized dialect of Mandarin language, but features aspects of other dialects in its usage, including written vernacular Chinese in the language’s grammar, Mandarin dialects in its vocabulary, and the Beijing dialect in the pronunciation of its words.”

— World Atlas 

Cantonese is another language which has official status in China, albeit in one specific region (Guangzhou), and is also the official language of Hong Kong. Whatever the precise number of Mandarin speakers, which is the most prevalent of the ‘Chinese languages’, there is no doubt that this is the most spoken in the world. And second place is not even close. In fact, approximately one in six of the world’s population boast ‘Standard Chinese’ as their mother tongue. For economic reasons too, it is an excellent choice for a second language to learn.

2. Spanish — 490 million native speakers

Spanish is the official language of 21 countries around the world, most of which are situated in South and Central America. However, there are also large number of native Spanish speakers in many other countries around the world, including the United States, so in terms of a language that can facilitate travel opportunities, this is a fantastic option. As with most of the languages on this list (and languages in general) there are dialect considerations, and politics in also intricately entwined too (just one look at Spain will reveal the political issues connected to language). What isn’t in doubt is the language’s place at number two on this particular list. 

3. English — 379 million native speakers

English is the third most-spoken language in the world in terms of native speakers, despite the fact that it is the official language (or one of the official languages) of an incredible 59 countries around the world. The largest English-speaking country is the United States of course, and that probably goes a long way to explaining why the language has become the official business lingua franca, as well as the standard communication language in international relations, travel, and a host of other activities.

Understanding why and how English has become the world’s dominant language in terms of many of these undertakings is a long and complicated story, but the fact is that it remains the most important second language for large swathes of the planet (there are an estimated 753 million people who are able to speak English as their non-mother tongue, meaning the language rivals Mandarin as the most widely-spoken language on the planet, with approximately one in six people able to communicate using it). 

4. Hindi — 341 Million Native Speakers

Hindi is mainly spoken in India, but also features in parts of Pakistan (there are again complicated political implications here that are best left alone in a blog article on languages). India, the second-most populous country on earth, actually has 23 official languages, and there is also fierce debate as to whether Hindustani is one official language, or Hindi and Urdu are two distinct dialects (with the latter more popularly spoken in Pakistan). Hindi is the dominant language of northern India, while the south still uses English as its official language of communication, although there is constant debate whether this will change to Hindi or not. As so often with language, it’s a complex and delicate subject. Interestingly, Hindi has given the English language many rich and varied words, from shampoo to bungalow. 

5. Arabic — 319 million native speakers

Once again, consideration needs to be given to the fact of whether Arabic is one catchall language, or actually a host of widely varying dialects. The reality is that Arabic can vary widely from region to region, and the term ‘Arabic’ is really just a name given for convenience. In written form, Modern Standard Arabic, which has been borne out of the Classical Arabic featuring in the Muslim Holy Book, is, as the name suggests, the standardized variant, but in spoken form, the language classified as Arabic can be immensely different: so much so that speakers from different countries can often have difficulties understanding each other.

6. Bengali — 228 million native speakers

Perhaps one of the more surprising inclusions on this list, upon greater reflection it really is no surprise that the major language in the country with the 8^th biggest population in the world is on this list. The vast majority of Bangladeshis speak Bengali, as do the people who live in the Indian mega-city of Kolkata and the residents of the Andaman Islands. Bangladesh also has one of the highest birth rates anywhere on the planet, so we can expect this number to grow substantially too in the coming years.

7. Portuguese — 221 million native speakers

As well as Portugal, Portuguese is the official language of the vast country of Brazil, which better explains its inclusion on this list. While Portugal can only boast a population of ten million people, its former colony has exploded to 210 million, accounting for 95% of the world’s native Portuguese speakers. There are a handful of other countries too in which native Portuguese speakers can be found, and it is the official language of nine independent states.

8. Russian — 153 million native speakers

The largest country in the world by land mass, Russia also has a huge population. The majority of the people in the country speak Russian as their mother tongue, and it is the official language in this ethnically diverse state. The language itself is infamously complex for non-native speakers to learn, and its Cyrillic lettering is instantly recognizable, if indecipherable to non speakers. It was also the language of an incredible array of literary greats, and is a language richly aligned with cultural pursuits.  

9. Japanese — 128 Million Native Speakers

Japanese is almost exclusively spoken, unsurprisingly, in Japan. In fact, more so than any other language on this list, it is a language concentrated almost entirely to a single country, but seeing as Japan has a huge population – it is the 11^th largest country in the world in terms of people – it is no surprise to see Japanese featured here. There are pockets of Japanese speakers in other countries – most notably in the United States and Brazil – but it doesn’t boast many non-native speakers either, so if you want to flex your Japanese linguistic skills, a trip to the Land of the Rising Sun is your best bet.

10. Lahnda (Western Punjabi) — 118 million native speakers

Lahnda, spoken primarily in the Western Punjab region, is Pakistan’s main language by number of native speakers, although interestingly, it is not the country’s official language, which is recognized as both Urdu and English. Lahnda is also spoken in Eastern Punjab, which is in India (the two regions were divided by the British). Lahnda is the third most widely spoken language in the region classified as the Indian sub-continent, behind Hundi and Bengali, and the fact that all three languages appear on this list tells you something about the size of the populations in that particular area of the world, as well as the rich cultural and linguistic diversity found there. 

The World’s 10 Most-Spoken Languages By Total Speakers

Now for a slightly different list. This time we factor in people’s ability to speak a particular language, no matter whether it is their mother tongue or not. Unsurprisingly, there are a few significant changes from the list above, with English the biggest climber up the list. These numbers are courtesy of World Atlas

1. English

1.139 billion total speakers

2. Mandarin Chinese (not Standard Chinese as listed above)

1.117 billion total speakers

3. Spanish

661 million total speakers

4. Hindi

544 million total speakers

5. Standard Arabic

422 million total speakers

6. Malay (Indonesian)

281 million total speakers

7. Russian

267 million total speakers

8. Bengali

261 million total speakers

=9. Portuguese

229 million total speakers

=9. French

229 million total speakers

The World’s 10 most officially recognized languages

And now for one final list: the languages which are the most widely recognized in terms of being a country’s official tongue. These countries are classified by the number of countries which list them as an official language, irrespective of those countries’ sizes in terms of population. These numbers are courtesy of World Atlas

1. English – 59 countries

2. French – 29 countries

3. Arabic – 27 countries

4. Spanish – 21 countries

5. Portuguese – 9 countries

6. German – 6 countries

=7. Berber – 5 countries

=7. Swahili – 5 countries

=7. Serbo-Croatian – 5 countries

=8. Russian – 4 countries

=8. Malay – 4 countries

=8. Italian – 4 countries

The post The World’s 10 Most-Spoken Languages appeared first on Linguix Blog.