Linguistic Computer Aids for Improving Technical Text

This project seeks to develop a set of computer-based writers' tools for the improvement of technical text. Also to be developed are extensible interfaces of these tools to the writer and to the documents being written. Tools planned for the initial inclusion in the system are a lexicon organized along semantic and lexical lines, a syntactic analyzer that applies a number of psycholinguistic rules for making text more comprehensible, and a tool that helps writers assess and solve coherence problems in their text. Also planned is text layout software that improves the comprehensibility of text by manipulating its layout to reflect linguistic structure. This page layout software will be developed to interface to popular page-layout programs. Phase I will develop a high-level description of each tool and the infrastructure that integrates them. Also developed in Phase I will be a development and marketing plan. This plan will be implemented in Phase II with the design, development, and evaluation of a prototype.