Linguistic editing support

Abstract

Unlike programmers, authors only get very little support from their writing tools, i.e., their word processors and editors. Current editors are unaware of the objects and structures of natural languages and only offer character-based operations for manipulating text. Writers thus have to execute complex sequences of low-level functions to achieve their rhetoric or stylistic goals while composing. Software requiring long and complex sequences of operations causes users to make slips. In the case of editing and revising, these slips result in typical revision errors, such as sentences without a verb, agreement errors, or incorrect word order. In the LingURed project, we are developing language-aware editing functions to prevent errors. These functions operate on linguistic elements, not characters, thus shortening the command sequences writers have to execute. This paper describes the motivation and background of the LingURed project and shows some prototypical language-aware functions.