Language supports for journal abstract writing across disciplines

Abstract

Various writing assistance tools have been developed through efforts in the areas of natural language processing with different degrees of success of curriculum integration depending on their functional rigor and pedagogical designs. In this paper, we developed a system, WriteAhead, that provides six types of suggestions when non‐native graduate students of English from different disciplines are composing journal abstracts, and assessed its effectiveness. The method involved automatically building domain‐specific corpora of abstracts from the Web via domain names and related keywords as query expansions, and automatically extracting vocabulary and n‐grams from the corpora in order to offer writing suggestions. At runtime, learners' input in the writing area of the system actively triggered a set of corresponding writing suggestions. This abstract writing assistant system facilitates interactions between learners and the system for writing abstracts in an effective and contextualized way, by providing suggestions such as collocations or transitional words. For assessment of WriteAhead, we compared the writing performance of two groups of students with or without using the system, and adopted student perception data. Findings show that the experiment group wrote better, and most students were satisfied with the system concerning most suggestion types, as they can effectively compose quality abstracts through provided language supports from WriteAhead.

The Role of Research-Article Writing Motivation and Self-Regulatory Strategies in Explaining Research-Article Abstract Writing Ability

“…First, from the perspective of Swalesian genre theory, L2 research-article writing, highly related to the social practices of a chosen disciplinary community, is a complex task involving various conventionalized sections expressing diff erent rhetorical functions (Swales, 1990 ;Flowerdew, 2000 ;Swales & Feak, 2009. A growing body of research taking this perspective has addressed how L2 graduate students become socially motivated and then strive to gain a legitimate researcher identity by writing research articles ( Flowerdew, 2000 ) and research-article abstracts ( Swales, 1990 ;Hsieh & Liou, 2008 ;Hancıoğlu, 2009 ;Liou, Yang, & Chang, 2012 ) acceptable to a disciplinary community, according to its writing norms (such as specifi c lexis and schematic structures of research articles). These studies indicated that L2 learners' motivation can largely infl uence their performances in research-article writing, including gaining journal publications ( Flowerdew, 2000 ) and conference paper presentations ( Swales, 1990 ) and writing better abstracts ( Hsieh & Liou, 2008 ;Hancıoğlu, 2009 ;Liou, et al ., 2012 ).…”

“…A growing body of research taking this perspective has addressed how L2 graduate students become socially motivated and then strive to gain a legitimate researcher identity by writing research articles ( Flowerdew, 2000 ) and research-article abstracts ( Swales, 1990 ;Hsieh & Liou, 2008 ;Hancıoğlu, 2009 ;Liou, Yang, & Chang, 2012 ) acceptable to a disciplinary community, according to its writing norms (such as specifi c lexis and schematic structures of research articles). These studies indicated that L2 learners' motivation can largely infl uence their performances in research-article writing, including gaining journal publications ( Flowerdew, 2000 ) and conference paper presentations ( Swales, 1990 ) and writing better abstracts ( Hsieh & Liou, 2008 ;Hancıoğlu, 2009 ;Liou, et al ., 2012 ). Thus, it was hypothesized that L2 graduate students' research-article writing motivation (i.e., with fi ve factors of interest value, utility value, connectedness value, cost, and ability self-concept) had a direct eff ect on research-article abstract writing ability.…”

WriteAhead2: Mining Lexical Grammar Patterns for Assisted Writing

“…We present a new system, WriteAhead2, that proactively provides just-in-time writing suggestions to assist student writers, while they type away. WriteAhead2 is a continuation of the work of WriteAhead (Liou, Yang, Chang 2012). Example WriteAhead2 suggestions for "We propose a method dictionary examples and automatically tagged sentences in a corpus.…”

Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Demonstrations

“…WriteAhead2 is a continuation of the work of WriteAhead (Liou, Yang, Chang 2012). Example WriteAhead2 suggestions for "We propose a method 106 ..." are shown in Figure 1.…”