Developing a computer-assisted writing system to solve phraseological problems for Chinese graduate students' academic writing

This study develops a computer-assisted writing system, consisting of the searching module and the text editing module. The searching module is characterised by part-of-speech (POS) collocation search which retrieves technical and general collocations from a customised corpus of research articles in a specialised field. The text editing module is characterised by next-word prediction which works on lexical bundle lists from COCA. Through the development of these modules and functions, the POS and position of collocations are specified, the word likely to follow a given sequence is predicted, English for technical use and general use are concerned, and the display of the retrieved information is optimised. At present, this system works well in the research field of tubulin. It could be applied to academic writing of other research areas if the customised corpus of that area is built and uploaded.