In the past decade, natural language processing applications have become part of our everyday experience, from spell and grammar checking in word processors to machine translation on the web, from email spam detection to automatic question answering, from detecting people's opinions about products or services to extracting appointments from email. In that context, we developed a GUI application that takes unstructured text input, processes it, and then detects various parameters such as parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc), readability indexes, stress positions, etc. It also generates a word cloud where a user can see the frequency of words used. In addition, it allows the user to compare his/her writing with a corpus of highly graded papers. This application is designed to help college students improve their writing skills.

Committee
Dr. Ying Zhu (chair)
Dr. Yanqing Zhang