An intelligent computer-assistant for stylistic instruction

This article describes an intelligent computerassisted language instruction system that is designed to teach principles of syntactic style to students of English. Unlike conventional style checkers, the system performs a complete syntactic analysis of its input, and takes the student's stylistic intent into account when providing a diagnosis. Named STASEL for Stylistic Treatment At the Sentence Level, the system is specifically developed for the teaching of style, and makes use of artificial intelligence techniques in natural language processing to analyze free-form input sentences interactively. An important contribution of STASEL is its ability to provide stylistic guidance according to the specific writing goals of clarity and conciseness. In an attempt to remedy some of the deficiencies of existing instructional software, STASEL's design demonstrates how stylistic instruction can be effectively computerized, while laying the groundwork for the creation of intelhgent tutoring systems for teaching writing. Julie Payette received her B.Eng. in electrical engineering from McGill University (1986) and her M.A.Sc. from the University of Toronto (1990). She has recently been selected as a Canadian astronaut, and is currently training at the Canadian Space Agency in Ottawa. Graeme Hirst is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Semantic Interpretation and the Resolution of Ambiguity (Cambridge, 1987), and many papers on natural language understanding. Computers and the Humanities 26: 87--102, 1992. © 1992 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.