Writing Aid Dutch - Supporting Students’ Writing Skills by Means of a String and Pattern Matching based Web Application

Margot D'Hertefelt, Lieve De Wachter, Serge Verlinde

2014

Abstract

Students at universities and colleges in Belgium and abroad often experience difficulties with writing (academic) texts in their native language (De Wachter and Heeren, 2011; Dugan and Polanski, 2006; Gray et al., 2005; Napolitano and Stent, 2009). This is reflected in many initiatives that are being developed specifically to support students’ writing skills, among other the development of electronic writing assistance systems. Many of these systems are based on Natural Language Processing techniques, such as parsing. In this paper, we will argue that writing aids do not always have to make use of NLP techniques in order to analyze texts in a detailed and accurate way. We present an online writing aid, Writing Aid Dutch, which marks possible areas of concern in students’ texts on three levels: (1) text structure and cohesion, (2) style and (3) spelling and provides users with individualized feedback. Writing Aid Dutch uses a lot of data and analyzes texts using complex queries and string matching techniques. Initial user experiences have been very positive so far. From February 2014 onwards, the effectiveness of the writing aid will be investigated in a one-group pre-post test design.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

D'Hertefelt M., De Wachter L. and Verlinde S. (2014). Writing Aid Dutch - Supporting Students’ Writing Skills by Means of a String and Pattern Matching based Web Application . In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU, ISBN 978-989-758-020-8, pages 486-491. DOI: 10.5220/0004948704860491

in Bibtex Style

@conference{csedu14,
author={Margot D'Hertefelt and Lieve De Wachter and Serge Verlinde},
title={Writing Aid Dutch - Supporting Students’ Writing Skills by Means of a String and Pattern Matching based Web Application},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,},
year={2014},
pages={486-491},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004948704860491},
isbn={978-989-758-020-8},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,
TI - Writing Aid Dutch - Supporting Students’ Writing Skills by Means of a String and Pattern Matching based Web Application
SN - 978-989-758-020-8
AU - D'Hertefelt M.
AU - De Wachter L.
AU - Verlinde S.
PY - 2014
SP - 486
EP - 491
DO - 10.5220/0004948704860491