Constructing a Tagged E-J Parallel Corpus for Assisting Japanese Software Engineers in Writing English Abstracts

This paper presents how we constructed a tagged E-J parallel corpus of sample abstracts, which is the core language resource for our English abstract writing tool, the “Abstract Helper.” This writing tool is aimed at helping Japanese software engineers be more productive in writing by providing them with good models of English abstracts. We collected 539 English abstracts from technical journals/proceedings and prepared their Japanese translations. After analyzing the rhetorical structure of these sample abstracts, we tagged each sample abstract with both an abstract type and an organizational-scheme type. We also tagged each sample sentence with a sentence role and one or more verb complementation patterns. We also show that our tagged E-J parallel corpus of sample abstracts can be effectively used for providing users with both discourse-level guidance and sentence-level assistance. Finally, we discuss the outlook for further development of the “Abstract Helper.”