Description

Like all mass nouns (non-count nouns) "damage" is often used in the plural by non-native speakers.
But this noun is special because it does have a specific sense which is plural:

✅ The hurricane caused a lot of damage.
✅ The judge awarded damages to the plaintiff.
❌ After the accident he had to have the damages to his car repaired.

"Damages" is also a common verb form:
✅ Extreme heat damages surface-mount components.

This one will probably be quite difficult to detect. Perhaps proximity to certain keywords in the same chunk or same document can be used. The description should make clear that it can't make perfect determinations. The message should be informative and should try not to confuse a user into making a wrong "correction".

Resources

• harwardcommunications
• English StackExchange
• Grammarphobia
• WordReference
• Cambridge Dictionary "damages"
• Oxford Learners "damage" and "damages"
• Collins Dictionary "damage"
• Collins Dictionary "damages"
• Merriam-Webster Dictionary "damage" and "damages"

Examples

Examples of the error from GitHub:

• Flow networks robust against damages are simple model networks described in a series of publications by Kaluza et al.
• POC to select vehicle damages on a car and mark the severity - sudheeshcm/vehicle-damage-selector.
• This is a web application that detects damages on mangoes using a TensorFlow model with Django as the frontend framework
• Detecting different types of damages of roads like cracks and potholes for the given image/video of the road.

Examples from GitHub where it seems to be used correctly in regard to financial compensation:

• Code used for calculating damages in lost chance cases.
• Where the dispute involves a claim for damages in respect of a motor accident for cost of rental of a replacement vehicle
• Under this section, the Commercial Contributor would have to
  defend claims against the other Contributors related to those
  performance claims and warranties, and if a court requires any other
  Contributor to pay any damages as a result, the Commercial Contributor
  must pay those damages.

Examples from GitHub where it's not an error but a verb:

• Profiles pb's and damages them when their runtime goes over a set value - sirhamsteralot/HaE-PBLimiter.
• Opening Wayland-native terminal damages Firefox
• Open File Requester damages underlaying windows when moved

Examples from GitHub that are too hard to call - maybe they are talking about financial compensation?

• The goal is to estimate the damages of each link in the Graph object using the Damages result (estimating the damages for each segment of a Network).
• This repository contains code to conduct statistical inference in cartel damages estimation. It will be updated to include a Stata .do file which approximates the standard error of total damages from a fixed effects panel data model, using the delta method.
• Financial damages caused by received errors $$$$
• It would be useful to be able to see asset-level damages after running FDA 2.0.

Potential False Positives

"Damages" is also the third-person singular present verb and is very common.