This paper reports on the development of an analysis engine for the Research Writing Tutor (RWT), an AWE program designed to provide genre and discipline-specific feedback on the functional units of research article discourse. Unlike traditional NLP-based applications that categorize complete documents, the analyzer categorizes every sentence in…

Thanks to natural language processing technologies, computer programs are actively being used not only for holistic scoring, but also for formative evaluation of writing. CyWrite is one such program that is under development. The program is built upon Second Language Acquisition theories and aims to assist ESL learners in higher education by…

A classifier which is capable of distinguishing a syntactically well formed sentence from a syntactically ill formed one has the potential to be useful in an L2 language-learning context. In this article, we describe a classifier which classifies English sentences as either well formed or ill formed using information gleaned from three different…

We built a natural language processing (NLP) system implementing a "virtual writing conference" for elementary-school children, with German as the target language. Currently, state-of-the-art computer support for writing tasks is restricted to multiple-choice questions or quizzes because automatic parsing of the often ambiguous and fragmentary…