Although Japanese has relatively free word order, Japanese word order is not completely arbitrary and has some sort of preference. Since such preference is incompletely understood, even native Japanese writers often write Japanese sentences which are grammatically well-formed but not easy to read. This paper proposes a method for reordering words in a Japanese sentence so that the sentence beco...

This paper identifies and examines the key principles underlying building a state-of-theart grammatical error correction system. We do this by analyzing the Illinois system that placed first among seventeen teams in the recent CoNLL-2013 shared task on grammatical error correction. The system focuses on five different types of errors common among non-native English writers. We describe four des...

ESL Assistant is a prototype web-based writing-assistance tool that is being developed for English Language Learners. The system focuses on types of errors that are typically made by non-native writers of American English. A freely-available prototype was deployed in June 2008. User data from this system are manually evaluated to identify writing domain and measure system accuracy. Combining th...

Academic writing is no longer considered an objective and impersonal form of discourse. It is now seen as an attempt involving interaction between writers and readers; hence, academics are not only required to produce texts representing external realities but also to use language to recognize, build, and exchange social relations. The present study aimed to analyze how native English speakers, ...

In order to develop an understanding of the rhetorical conventions in the Persian language and to find out the metadiscursive cultural norms of Iranian writers in their native language writings, it is necessary to probe into the implicit rhetorical features of academic writing which has so far eluded a comprehensive systematic characterization. Metadiscourse marking, which is supposed to be one...

This paper presents a grammar and style checker demonstrator for Spanish and Greek native writers developed within the project GramCheck. Besides a brief grammar error typology for Spanish, a linguistically motivated approach to detection and diagnosis is presented, based on the generalized use of PROLOG extensions to highly typed unification-based grammars. The demonstrator, currently includin...

Pursuing medicine means to a large extent pursuing medical science. A medical career also includes a substantial amount of writing, particularly for those who enter academia. Apart from science, during their professional lifetimes medical people are exposed to thousands of life stories, into which they, by necessity, intrude. Dealing with individual illnesses, and thus patients’ bodies, brings ...

We describe an algorithm that relies on web frequency counts to identify and correct writing errors made by non-native writers of English. Evaluation of the system on a realworld ESL corpus showed very promising performance on the very difficult problem of critiquing English determiner use: 62% precision and 41% recall, with a false flag rate of only 2% (compared to a random-guessing baseline o...