WriteAhead2: Mining Lexical Grammar Patterns for Assisted Writing

This paper describes WriteAhead2, an interactive writing environment that provides lexical and grammatical suggestions for second language learners, and helps them write fluently and avoid common writing errors. The method involves learning phrase templates from dictionary examples, and extracting grammar patterns with example phrases from an academic corpus. At run-time, as the user types word after word, the actions trigger a list after list of suggestions. Each successive list contains grammar patterns and examples, most relevant to the half-baked sentence. WriteAhead2 facilitates steady, timely, and spot-on interactions between learner writers and relevant information for effective assisted writing. Preliminary experiments show that WriteAhead2 has the potential to induce better writing and improve writing skills.