基于语义的英文短语检索与搭配推荐及其在辅助ESL学术写作中的应用

Semantic-Based ESL Phrase Retrieval and Collocation Suggestion

学术英文写作对于母语非英语的(English as a Second Language,ESL)学者而言是一项挑战.现有的ESL写作辅助系统均基于连续单词(n-gram)在语料库中出现的频率来构建,而忽略了语义信息对于ESL写作的作用.文中提出基于语义的写作辅助方法,支持按照词性、搭配类型和概念扩展等语义条件来检索短语和自动推荐搭配.此外,为了方便英语知识有限的ESL学者利用语义条件进行检索,文中还设计了易于理解的短语检索界面.该界面提供包含语义修饰符的查询表达式,并可根据用户输入的部分查询表达式在线提示和补全.最后,为验证语义方法的有效性,文中实现并部署了ESLWriter系统.用户实验表明,ESLWriter可以有效地推荐搭配并提供短语检索结果,其查询界面直观易用;ESL学者通过混合使用自动搭配推荐功能和短语检索功能,写作质量和写作信心得到有效提高.这些结果证明了语义信息在ESL写作辅助中的重要作用.

Academic writing in English is a challenge for scholars who use English as a Second Language（ESL）.Existing English writing assistant systems are usually based on the frequency of consecutive words（n-gram）in the corpus,but ignore the role of semantic information in ESL writing.In this research,we propose a semantic approach to support ESL writing,which allows users to retrieve corpus phrases and automatically makes collocation suggestions using a number of semantic constraints,including part-of-speech,collocation type,and conceptual expansion.Furthermore,to address the limited linguistic knowledge of general ESL users,we design an easy-to-understand query interface for phrase retrieval,which supports query with semantic modifiers,and can automatically suggest query expressions according to users＇ input.To examine the validity of our semantic approach,we implement a real running system ESLWriter.User experiments show that ESLWriter is helpful in phrase retrieval and collocation suggestion,and the query interface for end users is intuitive and easy-to-use.Participants can significantly improve their writing quality and confidence by mixed use of the two functions.These results confirm the effectiveness of incorporating semantic information into ESL writing system.