The design and implementation of a novel English writing environment is described. The system integrates modern computer and networking technologies with analytical tools from linguistics and language pedagogy to construct an advanced English writing environment. The system is not only suitable for students in learning English, but also of benefit to teachers in making comments and detecting learners' common difficulties. Furthermore, the collected essays from students and comments from teachers constitute a useful learner corpus. This is also of benefit to researchers in analyzing learners' persistent errors. In order to allow global access from the Internet, the system is web-based. Users, for example, students, teachers, and researchers, may access the system through web browsers. The system was developed in a cooperative effort of Computers And Networking (CAN) laboratory and the Research in English Acquisition and Pedagogy (REAP) Group at Tamkang University. The system has been piloted by six English faculty members at Tamkang University and is currently being used in five high schools in Taiwan. The learner corpus currently consists of over 800,000 word tokens of learners' writing.

This paper describes a new method for learning bilingual collocations from sentence-aligned parallel corpora. Our method comprises two steps: (1) extracting useful word chunks (n-grams) in each language by word-level sorting and (2) constructing bilingual collocations by combining the word-chunks acquired in stage (1). We apply the method to a two kinds of Japanese-English texts; (1) scientific articles that comprise relatively literal translations and (2) more challenging texts: a stock market bulletin in Japanese and its abstract in English. In both cases, domain specific collocations are well captured even if they were not contained in the dictionaries of specialized terms.

This system called COKIS automatically extracts knowledge about C functions from the UNIX on-line manual by using its description paragraph and the user can interactively inquire to the system in order to know about UNIX C functions. The idea is motivated on the one side to free users from being involved in an exhaustive knowledge acquisition in the past, and to examine problems in understanding knowledge itself on the other. We propose Memory Processor which is implemented to realize extracting knowledges from corpus and processing dialogues in the inquiry system at the same modules.

This paper describes issues on dialogue corpora for speech and natural language research. Speech and text corpora of dialogue have recently become more important for the development and the evaluation of speech and text-based dialogue systems. However, the design and the construction of dialogue corpora themselves still remain research issues and many problems have not yet been clarified. Many kinds of corpus are necessary to study various aspects of dialogues. On the other hand, each corpus should contain a certain quantity for each purpose in order to make it statistically meaningful. This paper presents the issues related with design and creation of dialogue corpora; the selection of a task domain, transcription conventions, situations for the collection, syntactic and semantic ill-formedness, and politeness. Future directions for dialogue corpora creation are also discussed.