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的万维网系统，该系统可以帮助日本医学研究人员利用与生命/医学科学相关的语料库撰写英文研究论文。为此，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，主要由英语母语人士撰写。该语料库现在包含超过6000万个运行词。语料库的统计分析使我们能够获得哪些特定单词或短语频繁出现以及哪些单词通常与给定单词搭配的信息。长期以来，许多日本医学研究人员一直苦于缺乏这种有用的信息，因此倾向于编写偏离母语人士所遵循的语言惯例的英语。在我们的项目中开发的系统为用户提供了有用的信息，几乎每个单词的一致性和搭配，只需点击鼠标按钮，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像日本人那样的直觉，这导致了诸如“高可能性”或“可能”等尴尬的表达。然而，现在这个系统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的非母语直觉。这将有助于减轻日本医学研究人员用英语撰写研究论文的负担。

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.