Development of a WorldWideWeb System to Assist Japanese Medical Researchers in Writing English Papers with the help of a Life/Medical Science Related Corpus

该项目的目的是开发一个新颖的万维网系统，该系统可以利用与生命/医学相关的语料库来帮助日本医学研究人员撰写英文研究论文。为了做到这一点，我们首先编制了一个英语语料库，其中包括主要与生命/医学科学有关的科学论文，主要是由以英语为母语的人撰写的。语料库目前收录了6000多万个流动词，对语料库的统计分析使我们能够获得哪些特定的词或短语经常出现以及哪些词经常与给定的词搭配的信息。许多日本医学研究人员长期以来一直缺乏这类有用的信息，因此倾向于产生偏离母语人士所观察到的语言惯例的英语。在我们的项目中开发的系统为用户提供了有用的信息，几乎每一个单词都可以通过点击鼠标按钮来检索，只要检索到的单词包含在语料库中。大多数日本医学研究人员在使用英语时缺乏母语的直觉，这导致了像‘High Possity’或‘My Possity’这样的笨拙表达。然而，现在该系统已经在互联网上广泛地向公众开放，他们可以在需要确认特定英语单词组合的自然性时参考它，而不是简单地依靠自己非母语的直觉。因此，这应该有助于减轻日本医学研究人员用英语撰写研究论文时的负担。

The aim of this project was to develop a novel World Wide Web system that can assist Japanese medical researchers in writing English research papers by taking advantage of a life/medical science related corpus. To accomplish this, we first compiled an English corpus consisting of scientific papers relating mainly to life/medical sciences and principally written by native speakers of English. The corpus now contains more than 60,000,000 running words.Statistical analyses of the corpus have enabled us to obtain information on which particular words or phrases occur frequently and which words commonly collocate with a given word. Many Japanese medical researchers have long suffered from the absence of this kind of useful information and have therefore tended to produce English that deviates from the linguistic conventions observed by native speakers. 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 medical 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 Japanese medical researchers when writing research papers in English.