Extracting Formulaic Expressions and Grammar and Edit Patterns to Assist Academic Writing

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.