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.

We present a method for extracting formulaic expressions, grammar patterns, and editing rules from a given corpus to assist learners in learning to write at the level required in English for Academic Purposes. In our method, sentences in a given corpus are parsed into chunks of base phrases, with the arguments sense disambiguated to derive syntactic and semantic grammar patterns. The method involves executing shallow parsing, transforming phrases into grammar patterns, and filtering and ranking grammar patterns for each headword. We applied the proposed method to a corpus annotated with writing errors and their corrections to derive editing rules. Experiments based on a large-scale academic English corpus and WikEd Error Corpus showed that the proposed method produces reasonable correct grammar patterns as well as edit rules. Thus, the method has the potential to assist learners in writing and self-editing.

This paper describes WriteAhead, a resource-rich, Interactive Writing Environment that provides L2 learners with writing prompts, as well as "get it right" advice, to helps them write fluently and accurately. The method involves automatically analyzing reference and learner corpora, extracting grammar patterns with example phrases, and computing dubious, overused patterns. At run-time, as the user types (or mouses over) a word, the system automatically retrieves and displays grammar patterns and examples, most relevant to the word. The user can opt for patterns from a general corpus, academic corpus, learner corpus, or commonly overused dubious patterns found in a learner corpus. WriteAhead proactively engages the user with steady, timely, and spot-on information for effective assisted writing. Preliminary experiments show that WriteAhead fulfills the design goal of fostering learner independence and encouraging self-editing, and is likely to induce better writing, and improve writing skills in the long run.

In this paper, we describe a system for correcting grammatical errors in texts written by non-native learners. In our approach, a given sentence with syntactic features are sent to a number of modules, each focuses on a specific error type. A main program integrates corrections from these modules and outputs the corrected sentence. We evaluated our system on the official test data of the CoNLL-2014 shared task and obtained 0.30 in F-measure.