© 1993 by Association for Literary & Linguistic Computing
Articles |
An Example-based System of Writing English Sentences for Japanese English Users
The University of Electro-Communications Tokyo, Japan
Department of Computer Science, The University of Electro-Communications, Chofu, Tokyo 182, Japan
Writer's aid programs have been built to correct erroneous sentences in spelling, punctuation, syntax, grammar, usage, etc. Except for spelling checkers, however, the systems to check irregularities in English are of not great help for Japanese users of English: the problems they face are primarily in idiomatic ways of expressing ideas in English
Here we describe a writer's aid program that help the Japanese write sound English sentences. Instead of trying to find errors in what we have written, the system assists our English writing by doing the following: it takes as input a Japanese sentence, extracts relevant keywords from it, converts them to their English equivalents, retrieves sentences from databases, and finally presents them as the candidates for expressing what is in the Japanese. We may use one or more of the sentences retrieved to write or edit our own English, or ask with user-specified keywords for other examples when the ones presented are unsuitable.
We have tested the system in writing sentences for Acknowledgements and Notes on contributors, which are necessary sections used in papers when writing for academic journals. The results have proven that, where sufficient amounts of examples are taken for creating the database, a simple system such as this and the method it uses are surprisingly effective and helpful for the Japanese users of English.