Netspeak-Assisting Writers In Choosing Words

Netspeak is a Web service which helps writers in finding alternative expressions for what they want to say. It provides a large index of writing samples in the form of n-grams, n≤5, along with an efficient means to retrieve them by the use of wildcard queries. When in doubt about a phrasing, a user can get additional evidence by retrieving samples that match a given context. The figure below shows the results for a query where a user is interested in the two most frequently written words between “looks” and “me”. The first two columns give an idea about the customariness of each result, and the user can select the one most appropriate for her sentence.