Copyright © 2019 by Author/s and Licensed by Modestum Ltd., UK. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Journal of Information Systems Engineering & Management 2019, 4(2), em0099 ISSN: 2468-4376 Using an Ontology-based Approach to Build Open Assisting Tools in Foreign Language Writing Hugo Sanjurjo-González 1 *, Héctor Alaiz-Moretón 2 , Noelia Ramón 3 , Belén Labrador 3 , Isaías García 2 1 Department of English, Linguistics and History, University of Huddersfield, UK 2 Department of Electrical, Systems and Automatics Engineering, University of León, SPAIN 3 Department of Modern Languages, University of León, SPAIN *Corresponding Author: H.SanjurjoGonzalez@hud.ac.uk Citation: Sanjurjo-González, H., Alaiz-Moretón, H., Ramón, N., Labrador, B. and García, I. (2019). Using an Ontology-based Approach to Build Open Assisting Tools in Foreign Language Writing. Journal of Information Systems Engineering & Management, 4(2), em0099. https://doi.org/10.29333/jisem/5931 Published: September 15, 2019 ABSTRACT In today’s globalised world where there is a growing need for international communication, non-native speakers (NNS) from a wide range of professional fields are increasingly called upon to write specialised texts in English. More often than not, however, the linguistic competence required to do so is well beyond that of the majority of NNS. While software applications can serve to assist NNS in their English writing tasks, most of the applications available are designed for users of English for general purposes as opposed to English for professional purposes. Therefore, these applications lack the specific vocabulary, style guidelines and common structures required in more specialised documents. Necessary modifications to meet the needs of English for professional purposes tend to be viewed as representing an overly complex and expensive task. To overcome these challenges, we present a software called O-WEAA (Ontology-Writing English Assistant Architecture) which makes use of an ontology that represents the knowledge which, according to our formalisation, is required to write most types of specialised professional documents in the English language. Our formalisation of the required knowledge is based on an exhaustive linguistic analysis of several written genres. The proposed software is composed of two parts: i) a web application named Acquisition Interface Module, which allows experts to populate the ontology with new data and ii) a user- friendly, general web interface named Writing Assistant Interface Module which guides the user throughout the writing process of the English document in the specific domain described in the ontology. Keywords: knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, corpus linguistics, ontology classification and retrieval, natural language processing INTRODUCTION Because of globalisation, more and more people from different parts of the world are working together on projects related to their industry, economy or academic field. Most of these international relationships make use of English as a lingua franca, even in written contexts. This means that often NNS (non-native speakers) are required to write specialised documents in English and in a wide range of different areas. Some examples of such technical documents include medical abstracts, electronic product descriptions, and technical brochures. Writing such texts requires adherence to a strict set of conventions and rules, different in each domain. Achieving the competence and the proficiency required to do so is necessarily a long, complex and time-consuming process.