CEPT: Collaborative Editing Tool for Non-Native Authors

Due to language deficiencies, individual non-native speakers (NNS) face many difficulties while writing. In this paper, we propose to build a collaborative editing system that aims to facilitate the sharing of language knowledge among non-native co-authors, with the ultimate goal of improving writing quality. We describe CEPT, which allows individual co-authors to generate their own revisions as well as incorporating edits from others to achieve mutual inspiration. The main technical challenge is how to aggregate edits of multiple co-authors and present them in an easy-to-understand way. After iterative design, CEPT highlights three novel features: 1) cross-version sentence mapping for edit tracking, 2) summarization of edits from multiple co-authors, and 3) a collaborative editing interface that enables co-authors to examine, comment on, and borrow edits of others. A preliminary lab study showed that CEPT could significantly improve both the language quality and collaboration experience of NNS writers, due to its efficacy for sharing language knowledge.