Getting Involved

Get Involved

This page shares Marco's journey in contributing to open-source projects, particularly in improving language tools like dictionaries and grammar checkers, emphasising the importance of community involvement in improving software quality and accessibility.

Marco reflects on his experiences with OpenOffice during his Master's degree in 2009, noting the limitations of its dictionaries and the absence of a Portuguese grammar checker at that time. This led to challenges in his academic tasks.

Over time, Marco became actively involved in maintaining and improving language tools, such as the British and Portuguese dictionaries, and contributing to projects like LanguageTool. This page encourages others to participate in open-source initiatives to improve software for current and future users/generations.

You, too, can support open-source projects⠀
In my Master's degree in 2009, I used OpenOffice for most of the tasks. Back then, its dictionaries were poor and there wasn't a grammar checker for it with Portuguese rules.

As a result, my individual essays had several flaws and I didn't get brilliant grades in them.

I did get a brilliant grade in my dissertation, but I bought Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Student to write it, and I learned about grammar rules while writing the dissertation. I learned things such as italicizing the foreign words in Portuguese writing.

I am currently maintaining the open-source British speller, helping improve the Portuguese speller, as well as creating Portuguese grammar rules and the Portuguese morphologic dictionary for LanguageTool, among other things.

Things are improving a lot and this software can already be used for most written tasks for university, commercial and personal usage. Now people will have the chance I didn't have back in 2009.

Open-source software is becoming as good or better than commercial one, since we have the best/most dedicated team around. Some visionaries traced the path of humankind regarding free software decades ago. Indeed, “there were giants in those days (…) and their footsteps can still be felt today and throughout eternity (…)”, and today we still have talented people following their philosophy.

Like Shantanu said: developing open-source is a lifetime task, to be done at our own pace without many deadlines obligations.

Once, in a philosophical chat with JD, we spoke that the nation whose workers would work for free, would be the most powerful nation on Earth. The same happens with open-source: we work for free, so no one can match us, and the power users are noticing us. People who can’t afford expensive commercial software or who prefer “open standards” can find free replacements.

The Art of War: Photo by vlasta2, bluefootedbooby on flickr.com - https://www.flickr.com/photos/bluefootedbooby/370457835/, CC BY 2.0

Today there are tons of books with the same title, “The Art of War”, applying the concepts of Sun Tzu to many fields, from marketing to management. This Chinese General and strategist, born in 544 BC, even today has a major impact on society. The quote above in our case means: “Know the competition and your software, and you will win.”

I donate my time, knowledge, and resources to the community so that people can have the best for free. After knowing my illness, I went to three Medical Committees and retired for disability after receiving the official Social Security letter on 2.Dec.2022. I can now dedicate my time almost entirely to open-source, my greatest passion. Certainly, the divine plan was taking place, like PW said.

Together, we will change the world! We will make the world a better place to live for current and future generations. I have a dream: a spiritual, scientific and technological advanced civilisation with space travel technology, where life instead of price has value, happening in my lifetime.

OpenOffice/LibreOffice/Mozilla:
British Dictionary⠀
I have been responsible for the British dictionary since 2013, since it was not maintained any more; thus I “forked” it.

I pioneered certain concepts in this area, such as logging all the words added/changed to dictionaries, including possessive forms.

Open-source projects usually use LibreOffice dictionaries. This means that even if software and Linux users don't know I'm behind the British dictionary because my name doesn't appear in the operating system, they might be using my version. People can only know by viewing the dictionaries files manually.

To understand the magnitude of things, Linux has around 3.5 billion users in 2024:

https://earthweb.com/how-many-people-use-linux

If you find a dictionary word that appears as a typo, and you are certain it isn't, please e-mail it to me for analysis. If it exists in dictionaries such as Oxford or Collins, I will add it.

Please share your private wordlist if you feel there are very basic/common dictionary words missing.

You may also open a ticket on GitHub:

https://github.com/marcoagpinto/aoo-mozilla-en-dict

On 16.Oct.2021 I was quite touched with this Firefox review:

On 2.Feb.2022 I was also quite touched with this Firefox review:

Portuguese Dictionary⠀
Tiago Santos forked the Minho University Portuguese dictionary in 2017 and added numerous words to it, but there are still a considerable number of words missing or incorrect.

The project LanguageTool has internal dictionaries extending the dictionaries of the software where it is used, so you can report missing words/typos to the Portuguese team in GitHub (link below).

LanguageTool/WritingTool⠀
I am creating the Portuguese rules, proofing and morphologic dictionary for LanguageTool, along with some other individuals.

I joined the team in 2012 and have dedicated a lot of time to rewriting XML rules with obsolete code with recent code, since initially the postag dictionaries were poor.

My goal is to rewrite rules with recent code attempting to produce the same results and then improve them for better results, achieved by using all the knowledge I have acquired over the years.

The idea is to always be able to write the same sentences with fewer words since the simpler a sentence becomes, it improves readability, it allows more fluid reading and more in-depth understanding of its meaning. Some schools/universities limit the number of words in essays, so it is useful to use fewer words.

The tests I conduct while creating the rules are using the pt-BR (Brazilian) and the pt-PT (Portugal) corpora. Using both corpora is a terrible, slow procedure due to the insane number of sentences I use while testing.

LanguageTool is the most powerful grammar checker around, above any possible competition. I suggest everyone to check their university essays, dissertations and theses with it. Even if you use Microsoft Word, you can open the documents with LibreOffice just to check the grammar, like I did with my PhD thesis, which I also used to get ideas for rules as I revised it.

There is a free and a Premium (paid) version of LanguageTool. The Premium version checks for more characters and has extra rules.

In 2022, I got the help of Ricardo Joseh Lima from Brazil for Portuguese to help propose rules, report false positives, accuracy improvements and recommend better naming and categories for the rules.

The longer one examines the code and results, the more challenging it becomes to discern the valid and invalid results. The brain becomes “melted” reaching a point where I am unable to reason properly. However, after some rest, I emerge as a fresh new person.

Around September 2024, I started using ChatGPT 4o to clear any doubts I had about grammar rules with the PTnet IRC user, GALIK, teaching me on 16.Sep.2024 how to create proper prompts on ChatGPT for it to do most of the work for me such as validating results.

I spent around three months preceding 2025 seriously fixing verbs/nouns confusions in the Portuguese disambiguator caused by rare verbs. I believe to have fixed 100K+ hits while testing the code against a 950K corpus.

“Não tenho sentimento nenhum político ou social. Tenho, porém, num sentido, um alto sentimento patriótico. Minha pátria é a língua portuguesa.” (Fernando Pessoa)

LanguageTool:
Release Roadmap:

https://dev.languagetool.org/roadmap.html

Report missing/wrong grammar suggestions in the forum:

https://forum.languagetool.org

… or open a ticket on GitHub:

https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool