Automatic Collection of Useful Phrases for English Academic Writing

Abstract

English academic writing is indispensable for researchers to present their own research achievement. It is hard for non-native researchers to write research papers in English. They often refer to phrase dictionaries for academic writing to know useful expressions in academic writing. However, lexica available in the market do not have enough expressions and example sentences to serve the purpose since the lexica are created by hand. In order to respond to the demand for the better lexica, this paper proposes a method for extracting useful expressions automatically from English research papers. The expressions are extracted from research papers based on four characteristics of the expressions. The extracted expressions are classified into five classes; “introduction”, “related work”, “proposed method”, “experiment”, and “conclusion”. In our experiment using 1,232 research papers, our proposed method achieved 57.5% in precision and 51.9% in recall. The f-measure was higher than those of the baselines, and therefore, we confirmed the validity of our method. We developed a phrase search system using extracted phrasal expressions to support English academic writing.