PENS: A Machine-aided English Writing System for Chinese Users

Writing English is a big barrier for most Chinese users. To build a computer-aided system that helps Chinese users not only on spelling checking and grammar checking but also on writing in the way of native-English is a challenging task. Although machine translation is widely used for this purpose, how to find an efficient way in which human collaborates with computers remains an open issue. In this paper, based on the comprehensive study of Chinese users requirements, we propose an approach to machine aided English writing system, which consists of two components: 1) a statistical approach to word spelling help, and 2) an information retrieval based approach to intelligent recommendation by providing suggestive example sentences. Both components work together in a unified way, and highly improve the productivity of English writing. We also developed a pilot system, namely PENS (Perfect ENglish System). Preliminary experiments show very promising results.