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Are you good at writing? Or are you not good at it? If you could use a computer to improve your writing skills, would you want to use that system?

The term "written expression" covers a wide variety of writings, including novels, essays, reportage, and critiques. Each type of writing has its own unique style, techniques, and structure, but "writing ability" here refers to the ability to present facts objectively, clearly state one's opinion, do not allow for multiple different interpretations, and create writing that does not contain redundant expressions. In other words, it is the ability required to write reports, papers, manuals, and other technical documents.

At present, in universities, the development of written expression skills is as essential as the development of IT skills. There has been a marked decline in students' ability to understand and write reports, papers, and other written material, and university faculty who supervise them on a daily basis often complain that students "cannot write logical writing such as reports." In fact, according to a 2011 survey by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, over 90% of universities offer liberal arts education courses that "provide students with a program to learn how to write reports, papers, and other writing skills." (*)

Many of these schools try to teach students by improving their teaching methods and teaching materials and by having teachers directly involved in their work, but to develop writing skills, it is essential to have training through exercises and practical training in addition to lectures. However, in order to provide detailed instruction in editing, it is necessary to develop educational methodologies and train many excellent instructors. Unfortunately, there are not many institutions that can take on such an initiative. As a result, it is currently difficult to implement on a wide scale.

Therefore, Aoyama Gakuin University has been working on the "Japanese Expression Method Development Project (PaWeL: Promoting academic writing education through an e-Learning)" since 2008. This project aims to develop the ability to write logical sentences by utilizing educational support tools that use natural language processing technology. This will reduce the human burden that was previously required and realize effective education.

Natural language processing technology is a technology that enables computers to understand languages (natural languages) that we use in our daily lives, such as Japanese and English, and is used in Japanese conversion functions and automatic translation in word processing software, as well as voice recognition functions in smartphones.

So let’s take a look at how this tool can help you improve your writing.

*From the status of reforms in educational content at universities (FY2011)

The most important thing when writing objective, logical writing is to "write with paragraphs in mind." A paragraph is a collection of sentences (which can consist of a single sentence) that discusses one topic. A change in paragraph means that the topic changes, and if the paragraph does not change, the topic remains the same. In order to write effective writing while being conscious of paragraphs, it is important to keep in mind the following three points.

1. Each paragraph should address only one topic.

2. At the beginning of a paragraph, place a sentence (central sentence) that succinctly states the subject of the paragraph.

3. The first paragraph should summarize the entire text.

In this way, texts that are constructed with an awareness of sentence structure have excellent features such as "it is easy to distinguish between necessary and unnecessary information," "important information is not overlooked," and "the flow of the author's thoughts is easy to understand."

A useful tool for learning this kind of "paragraph writing" is the text structure comprehension support tool "Hinako." Hinako is a support tool that visually shows the thought process for constructing logical sentences in an easy-to-understand way.

The basic operation procedure of Hinako is very simple. The screen consists of two windows, the left window displays the "main text" and the right window displays the "central text". As a result, you can understand the content of the main text by reading only the central text.

The general flow of operations is as follows:

(1) In the left window, open the document you wrote.
(2) Create a summary by specifying the central sentence (if you do not specify the central sentence, the first sentence of each paragraph will be automatically extracted as the central sentence).
(3) Read the summary to see if you can understand the whole thing (Figure 1)
(4) Return to the left window and edit the text (Figure 2).
(5) Repeat steps (3) and onwards until you are satisfied with the results (Figure 3).

Learners load the text they have written into the left window. When they click the "Summary" button, a summary of that text will be displayed in the right window. If they can understand the text by reading only the summary, that's OK. If they can't understand it, they can revise the main text in the left window. They also check whether sentences other than the central sentence (called supporting sentences) properly reinforce the argument of the central sentence. By repeating this training, students can develop the habit of checking whether "the meaning and relevance of each paragraph is clear" and "whether the central sentence in each paragraph clearly and concisely expresses what the writer wants to assert," and hone their ability to write objective, logical sentences.

While paragraph writing with Hinako is a tool that checks and trains the "overall structure of a sentence," the proofreading and revision support tool introduced next, "Tomarigi," is a tool that checks the writing and structure of individual sentences to help you notice errors in the writing you have written and improve them.

When reading student reports and papers, I am surprised at how many of them use a lot of expressions that are inappropriate for writing objective and logical sentences, such as writing "as expected" when "as expected" should be, or repeatedly using expressions like "XX-like" without an appropriate explanation.

Tomarigi analyzes not only vocabulary and grammar, but also inappropriate colloquial expressions and other such things as "Are the 'dearu' and 'desumasu' styles being mixed up?", "Are kanji outside of common use being used?", "Where should a comma (,) be placed?", "Are the same particles being used consecutively?", and "Are demonstrative pronouns being used excessively?", and then extracts potential errors and displays detailed information and suggested corrections.

Tomarigi's basic screen (Figure 4) is composed of areas corresponding to four functions. In the "Editor area" framed in red, you can load existing documents, create new ones, and make edits. The "Suggestion card" framed in yellow shows where in a sentence there is a potential error, as well as the type and location of the error. The "Suggestion detail card" framed in blue shows detailed information about the error that was pointed out. Correction suggestions are also displayed if necessary. And the "Document information" framed in green shows attribute information about the text, such as the number of errors pointed out and the kanji content rate.

The basic flow of operation is:

(1) Enter text in the "Editor area"
(2) Run a proofreading and editing check
(3) The error or correction suggestion will be displayed on the "Suggestion Card." Click on it.
(4) Check the "Points to be Solved" (check for suggested corrections if necessary)
(5) Modify the sentence in the "Editor area" based on the suggestions.

We will proceed in the following steps.

Now let's look at a specific example of what Tomarigi points out. Figure 5 shows a case where the sentence "The mouse that the cat cornered ate was rotten" is entered into the editor area. Tomarigi points out that the modifying relationship is difficult to understand because a single sentence contains nested modifier clauses, "The mouse that the cat cornered" and "The cheese that the mouse ate." It then gives an example of a correction suggestion of splitting the sentence into two sentences, "The mouse that the cat cornered ate the cheese" and "The cheese was rotten."

The next example of a problem is when the sentence "Requests from government offices will be consolidated through a single contact point and the received information will be made public" is entered into the editor area (Figure 6). Tomarigi infers the dependency relationships of each phrase and then uses symbols to display "places where a comma should be inserted," "places where either is acceptable," and "places where a comma should not be inserted." It also displays the reason why a comma cannot be inserted between "consolidate through a single contact point" and "consolidate," and points out that a comma should be inserted after "receive."

In this way, by studying with Tomarigi, it is possible to learn the standard rules for writing sentences.

In 2010, Aoyama Gakuin University conducted a seminar class using tools such as Hinako and Tomarigi. Using each tool, students were asked to write five different types of writing for different purposes: an essay (500 characters), an email request, an explanatory letter (500 characters), a short essay (600-800 characters), and a report (3000 characters). On the last day of class, a student survey was conducted regarding the effectiveness of each tool. Results included "Hinako made me more conscious of the role of the central sentence in a paragraph description," "Tomarigi made me more conscious of errors in sentence structure, the use of modifiers, and the habits involved," and 74% of students said, "Throughout the class, I was able to write easy-to-understand sentences."

As mentioned at the beginning, the Japanese language expression skills cultivated by this tool are limited to those required for writing reports, papers, and technical documents such as manuals. However, if students can use such educational support tools to independently study the basics, it is believed that teachers will be able to focus on providing higher quality Japanese language education. It is also expected that in the future this tool will be used to support Japanese language learning for foreigners. Learning Japanese is a big hurdle not only for international students but also for foreigners who wish to work in Japan as nurses or caregivers. This tool may be useful in supporting the learning of such people.

Tools such as Hinako and Tomarigi introduced in this article are not necessarily the most cutting-edge technology in the world of computer science, including my research fields of artificial intelligence and natural language processing. However, by coordinating existing research results and technologies, it is also an important role for us researchers to "create things that are useful to society" that do not require expensive equipment or software. We would like to continue our research and development and develop even more excellent educational content.

Tools such as Hinako and Tomarigi have been released as the results of the PaWeL Japanese Expression Language Project, and are currently being improved through joint research with Hiroyuki Ohno, a former assistant professor in Department of Integrated information technology College of Science and Engineering University of Healthcare (currently an assistant professor in the Department of Medical Informatics, Faculty of Health Care, Tokyo Healthcare University). They can also be downloaded from the PaWeL Japanese Expression Language Project website (http://www.pawel.jp/).

Japanese Expression Development Project "PaWeL" website

(Published in 2015)