Effidit: Your AI Writing Assistant

Abstract

In this technical report, we introduce Effidit (Efficient and Intelligent Editing), a digital writing assistant that facilitates users to write higher-quality text more efficiently by using artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Previous writing assistants typically provide the function of error checking (to detect and correct spelling and grammatical errors) and limited text-rewriting functionality. With the emergence of large-scale neural language models, some systems support automatically completing a sentence or a paragraph. In Effidit, we significantly expand the capacities of a writing assistant by providing functions in five categories: text completion, error checking, text polishing, keywords to sentences (K2S), and cloud input methods (cloud IME). In the text completion category, Effidit supports generation-based sentence completion, retrieval-based sentence completion, and phrase completion. In contrast, many other writing assistants so far only provide one or two of the three functions. For text polishing, we have three functions: (context-aware) phrase polishing, sentence paraphrasing, and sentence expansion, whereas many other writing assistants often support one or two functions in this category. The main contents of this report include major modules of Effidit, methods for implementing these modules, and evaluation results of some key methods.