CorpusStudio : Surfacing Emergent Patterns In A Corpus Of Prior Work While Writing

Title data

Dang, Hai ; Swoopes, Chelse ; Buschek, Daniel ; Glassman, Elena L.:
CorpusStudio : Surfacing Emergent Patterns In A Corpus Of Prior Work While Writing.
In: Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. - New York, NY, USA : Association for Computing Machinery , 2025 . - 1211
ISBN 979-8-4007-1394-1
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713974

Project information

Abstract in another language

Many communities, including the scientific community, develop implicit writing norms. Understanding them is crucial for effective communication with that community. Writers gradually develop an implicit understanding of norms by reading papers and receiving feedback on their writing. However, it is difficult to both externalize this knowledge and apply it to one’s own writing. We propose two new writing support concepts that reify document and sentence-level patterns in a given text corpus: (1) an ordered distribution over section titles and (2) given the user’s draft and cursor location, many retrieved contextually relevant sentences. Recurring words in the latter are algorithmically highlighted to help users see any emergent norms. Study results (N=16) show that participants revised the structure and content using these concepts, gaining confidence in aligning with or breaking norms after reviewing many examples. These results demonstrate the value of reifying distributions over other authors’ writing choices during the writing process.