Third International Symposium on
Academic Writing and Critical Thinking
Corpus Search in Life Science Dictionary (LSD) as a Tool for Writing Scientific Papers
Takeshi Kawamoto1, 5, Nobuyuki Fujita2, 5, Hiroshi Ohtake3, 5, and Shuji Kaneko4, 5
1Hiroshima University, 2National Institute of Technology and Evaluation,
3Fukui Prefectural University, 4Kyoto University, 5The Life Science Dictionary Project
Writing academic papers in English is an essential skill even for non-native English speakers, including Japanese researchers. The corpus in the Life Science Dictionary (WebLSD Corpus) is a powerful tool that can extract useful information about correct or typical usages of English words from the LSD corpus. For example, expression, which usually means “gene expression” in the life science field, is used as an uncountable noun, which can be clarified by the WebLSD Corpus. Since this usage is specific to life sciences, it is necessary to check its usage in scientific papers. Associate can be used as both a transitive verb and an intransitive verb, and the meaning of associate differs depending on its usage pattern. Insight is usually used as both an uncountable noun and a plural form of a countable noun, but not in the singular form. These unexpected usages can be verified by using the WebLSD Corpus. To find critical information, we need to select the proper search options in the WebLSD Corpus. In this article, we show how to search for verbs, nouns, and irregular verbs using the WebLSD Corpus to enable researchers to find a variety of useful information on discipline specific English without seeking help from native English speakers.
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