Diamonds in the Rough: Generating Fluent Sentences from Early-Stage Drafts for Academic Writing Assistance

Takumi Ito, Tatsuki Kuribayashi, Hayato Kobayashi, Ana Brassard, Masato Hagiwara, Jun Suzuki, Kentaro Inui


Abstract
The writing process consists of several stages such as drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading. Studies on writing assistance, such as grammatical error correction (GEC), have mainly focused on sentence editing and proofreading, where surface-level issues such as typographical errors, spelling errors, or grammatical errors should be corrected. We broaden this focus to include the earlier revising stage, where sentences require adjustment to the information included or major rewriting and propose Sentence-level Revision (SentRev) as a new writing assistance task. Well-performing systems in this task can help inexperienced authors by producing fluent, complete sentences given their rough, incomplete drafts. We build a new freely available crowdsourced evaluation dataset consisting of incomplete sentences authored by non-native writers paired with their final versions extracted from published academic papers for developing and evaluating SentRev models. We also establish baseline performance on SentRev using our newly built evaluation dataset.
Anthology ID:
W19-8606
Volume:
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Natural Language Generation
Month:
October–November
Year:
2019
Address:
Tokyo, Japan
Editors:
Kees van Deemter, Chenghua Lin, Hiroya Takamura
Venue:
INLG
SIG:
SIGGEN
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
40–53
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-8606
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-8606
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Takumi Ito, Tatsuki Kuribayashi, Hayato Kobayashi, Ana Brassard, Masato Hagiwara, Jun Suzuki, and Kentaro Inui. 2019. Diamonds in the Rough: Generating Fluent Sentences from Early-Stage Drafts for Academic Writing Assistance. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, pages 40–53, Tokyo, Japan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Diamonds in the Rough: Generating Fluent Sentences from Early-Stage Drafts for Academic Writing Assistance (Ito et al., INLG 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-8606.pdf
Code
 taku-ito/INLG2019_SentRev
Data
JFLEG