CS Researchers Building an Automated Writing Assistant

5/1/2009

Written by

Dan Roth
Dan Roth

"I think a peace of cake would make me fill better." Who hasn't lamented the limited capabilities of today's spell checkers - unable to check for context or most grammatical mistakes, or to offer suggestions for alternative word usage or even placing adjectives and adverbs?

With the ubiquity of computing devices making authoring simple - think blogs, wikis, and Twitter - document production is at a higher rate than ever. Document quality however has not kept pace with document quantity, due to the speed with which the written word can now be distributed and to the wide audience of non-native English speakers who are now authoring in English in order to communicate on the web.

Yet today, the only tool available to assist is essentially a computerized version of that reference tool used for decades - the dictionary. Current authoring platforms offer minimal guidance with regard to the "correctness" of a document - context sensitive mistakes, word selection and usage, sentence structure and readability, use of connectives, etc.

Enter University of Illinois computer science professor Dan Roth. He and his team are currently working on a novel Automated Writing Assistant tool that aims to incorporate context-sensitive technologies at multiple levels of writing. His work was recently selected by the College of Engineering to receive funding from the Grainger Program in Emerging Technologies.

"We suggest that current natural language processing technologies allow us to develop a tool that can actually help writers - native speakers of English, non-native speakers, as well as a considerable population of writers with disabilities (e.g., dyslectics) - to produce better, professionally looking English documents, email messages and reports," says Roth.

The tool will rely on natural language processing techniques to identify and correct grammatical mistakes and context sensitive word usage mistakes (it's vs. its, peace vs. piece), identify missing or superfluous words, identify word usage errors, guide writers to select the right prepositions and determiners. In addition, Roth plans to support enriching the text by proposing to the writer the use of adjectives and adverbs that are appropriate in the context, as well as suitable multi-word expressions and idioms.

Prof. Roth is looking for bright programmers and web designers to help developing these ideas.

The two-year Grainger Program in Emerging Technologies funds several grants annually for two kinds of projects: early-stage, highly novel ideas that could have a major impact on technology and business and mature-stage, or "development" projects that close the gap between a proven idea and a viable product.


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This story was published May 1, 2009.