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The Construction of a Customized Medical Corpus for Assisting Chinese Clinicians in English Research Article Writing

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Chinese Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing Based on Naturally Annotated Big Data (NLP-NABD 2016, CCL 2016)

Abstract

A great number of clinicians in mainland China are under increasing pressure to publish their research results on international journals, and they urgently need support for writing research articles in English to compensate their limited English level. Though corpus has been proved to be a useful resource to assist second language learning and writing, research on corpus-assisted medical English writing is very sparse. This paper is concerned with the construction and application of a customized medical corpus for Chinese clinicians to aid their research article writing in English. With the support of a research project, this is the first customized medical corpus built under the joint collaboration between computer-linguistic researchers and clinicians in mainland China to directly serve the actual needs of clinicians. In particular, we report a case of how urologists apply the corpus – CCUT (Customized Corpus for Urology Team) in article writing under the situated assistance of linguistic researchers. The corpus has been found useful in assisting them in choosing the word of appropriate semantic relations, finding grammatical patterns different from general English in specialized medical context, learning how to use unfamiliar medical terms and revising “Chinglish” (unidiomatic) expressions.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Science and Technology Project of Guangdong Province, China (2016A040403113) and Innovative School Project in Higher Education of Guangdong, China (GWTP-LH-2014-02).

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Correspondence to Tianyong Hao .

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Wang, X., Gao, Y., Hao, T. (2016). The Construction of a Customized Medical Corpus for Assisting Chinese Clinicians in English Research Article Writing. In: Sun, M., Huang, X., Lin, H., Liu, Z., Liu, Y. (eds) Chinese Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing Based on Naturally Annotated Big Data. NLP-NABD CCL 2016 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10035. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47674-2_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47674-2_21

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