Jonathan James Webster


2020

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Automatic Assistance for Academic Word Usage
Dariush Saberi | John Lee | Jonathan James Webster
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

This paper describes a writing assistance system that helps students improve their academic writing. Given an input text, the system suggests lexical substitutions that aim to incorporate more academic vocabulary. The substitution candidates are drawn from an academic word list and ranked by a masked language model. Experimental results show that lexical formality analysis can improve the quality of the suggestions, in comparison to a baseline that relies on the masked language model only.