This paper presents LinggleWrite, a writing coach that provides writing suggestions, assesses writing proficiency levels, detects grammatical errors, and offers corrective feedback in response to user’s essay. The method involves extracting grammar patterns, training models for automated essay scoring (AES) and grammatical error detection (GED), and finally retrieving plausible corrections from a n-gram search engine. Experiments on public test sets indicate that both AES and GED models achieve state-of-the-art performance. These results show that LinggleWrite is potentially useful in helping learners improve their writing skills.

We present a method for learning bilingual word embeddings in order to support second language (L2) learners in finding recurring phrases and example sentences that match mixed-code queries (e.g., “接 受 sentence”) composed of words in both target language and native language (L1). In our approach, mixed-code queries are transformed into target language queries aimed at maximizing the probability of retrieving relevant target language phrases and sentences. The method involves converting a given parallel corpus into mixed-code data, generating word embeddings from mixed-code data, and expanding queries in target languages based on bilingual word embeddings. We present a prototype search engine, x.Linggle, that applies the method to a linguistic search engine for a parallel corpus. Preliminary evaluation on a list of common word-translation shows that the method performs reasonablly well.

We introduce a method for generating suggestions on a given sentence for improving the proficiency level. In our approach, the sentence is transformed into a sequence of grammatical elements aimed at providing suggestions of more advanced grammar elements based on originals. The method involves parsing the sentence, identifying grammatical elements, and ranking related elements to recommend a higher level of grammatical element. We present a prototype tutoring system, Level-Up, that applies the method to English learners’ essays in order to assist them in writing and reading. Evaluation on a set of essays shows that our method does assist user in writing.

We introduce a system aimed at improving and expanding second language learners’ English vocabulary. In addition to word definitions, we provide rich lexical information such as collocations and grammar patterns for target words. We present Linggle Booster that takes an article, identifies target vocabulary, provides lexical information, and generates a quiz on target words. Linggle Booster also links named-entity to corresponding Wikipedia pages. Evaluation on a set of target words shows that the method have reasonably good performance in terms of generating useful and information for learning vocabulary.

This paper presents a grammatical error correction (GEC) system that provides corrective feedback for essays. We apply the sequence-to-sequence model, which is frequently used in machine translation and text summarization, to this GEC task. The model is trained by EF-Cambridge Open Language Database (EFCAMDAT), a large learner corpus annotated with grammatical errors and corrections. Evaluation shows that our system achieves competitive performance on a number of publicly available testsets.

In this paper, we present a system, LanguageNet, which can help second language learners to search for different meanings and usages of a word. We disambiguate word senses based on the pairs of an English word and its corresponding Chinese translations in a parallel corpus, UM-Corpus. The process involved performing word alignment, learning vector space representations of words and training a classifier to distinguish words into groups of senses. LanguageNet directly shows the definition of a sense, bilingual synonyms and sense relevant examples.

According to the analysis of Cambridge Learner Corpus, using a wrong verb is the most common type of grammatical errors. This paper describes Verb Replacer, a system for detecting and correcting potential verb errors in a given sentence. In our approach, alternative verbs are considered to replace the verb based on an error-annotated corpus and verb-object collocations. The method involves applying regression on channel models, parsing the sentence, identifying the verbs, retrieving a small set of alternative verbs, and evaluating each alternative. Our method combines and improves channel and language models, resulting in high recall of detecting and correcting verb misuse.

In this paper, we present a method for extracting Synchronous Grammar Patterns (SGPs) from a given parallel corpus in order to assisted second language learners in writing. A grammar pattern consists of a head word (verb, noun, or adjective) and its syntactic environment. A synchronous grammar pattern describes a grammar pattern in the target language (e.g., English) and its counterpart in an other language (e.g., Mandarin), serving the purpose of native language support. Our method involves identifying the grammar patterns in the target language, aligning these patterns with the target language patterns, and finally filtering valid SGPs. The extracted SGPs with examples are then used to develop a prototype writing assistant system, called WriteAhead/bilingual. Evaluation on a set of randomly selected SGPs shows that our system provides satisfactory writing suggestions for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners.

This paper shows the great potential of incorporating different approaches to help writing. Not only did they solve different kinds of writing problems, but also they complement and reinforce each other to be a complete and effective solution. Despite the extensive and multifaceted feedback and suggestion, writing is not all about syntactically or lexically well-written. It involves contents, structure, the certain understanding of the background, and many other factors to compose a rich, organized and sophisticated text. (e.g., conventional structure and idioms in academic writing). There is still a long way to go to accomplish the ultimate goal. We envision the future of writing to be a joyful experience with the help of instantaneous suggestion and constructive feedback.