Development of a WoridWideWeb System to Help Researchers Write Scientific Papers in English

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The aim of this research project was to develop a novel World_Wide_Web system to assist Japanese researchers in writing English research papers. To accomplish this, we first compiled an English corpus consisting of scientific papers relating mainly to life sciences and principally written by native speakers of English. The corpus now contains more than 30,000,000 running words.A statistical analysis of the corpus enabled us to obtain information on which particular words or phrases occur frequently and which words commonly collocate with a given word. Japanese scientists have long wanted to have access to this kind of information so as to avoid deviating from the linguistic conventions observed by native speakers in writing English. The system developed in our project provides users with useful information on concordances and collocations for almost each and every word with just a click of a mouse button, as long as the word retrieved is contained in the corpus.Most Japanese researchers lack native-like intuition in using English, which has resulted in awkward expressions such as 'high possibility' or 'may probably.' However, now that the system is widely available to the public on the Internet, they can refer to it whenever they need to confirm the naturalness of a particular combination of English words instead of simply relying on their own non-native-like intuitions. This should thereby help to lessen the burden on non-native speakers of English (such as Japanese researchers) when writing research papers in English.