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

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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.