Text revision in Scientific Writing Assistance: An Overview
It addresses the problem of improving scientific writing quality for researchers, especially non-native speakers, but is incremental as it offers a review rather than new solutions.
This article provides an overview of text revision tools for scientific writing, highlighting the challenges faced by non-native English speakers and the evolution from rule-based to neural-based approaches, though issues like accessibility and context limitations persist.
Writing a scientific article is a challenging task as it is a highly codified genre. Good writing skills are essential to properly convey ideas and results of research work. Since the majority of scientific articles are currently written in English, this exercise is all the more difficult for non-native English speakers as they additionally have to face language issues. This article aims to provide an overview of text revision in writing assistance in the scientific domain. We will examine the specificities of scientific writing, including the format and conventions commonly used in research articles. Additionally, this overview will explore the various types of writing assistance tools available for text revision. Despite the evolution of the technology behind these tools through the years, from rule-based approaches to deep neural-based ones, challenges still exist (tools' accessibility, limited consideration of the context, inexplicit use of discursive information, etc.)