Writing problems common among many college students are "phrasal" errors such as limited vocabulary, inability to distinguish standard usage from slang or jargon, a tendency to frame thoughts in cliches, a peppering of meaningless intensifiers, and a gift for redundancy and wordiness. To help correct these problems, a text-checking system called…

A computer-based artificial neural network (ANN) that learns to classify sentences in a text as important or unimportant is described. The program is designed to select the sentences that are important enough to be included in composition of an abstract of the text. The ANN is embedded in a conventional symbolic environment consisting of…