Conventional collocations
Collocations are words which are conventionally used together (e.g. collect data, change dramatically, highly significant, etc.).
Violating conventions
Violating collocation conventions can result in errors (e.g. *depend of something) or awkward, non-idiomatic text (e.g. *a large mistake).
better texts
This affects not only writing, but also reading, since texts with collocation problems are more difficult to process.
?The 
project aims to develop an intuitive writing assistant for users of academic English. Its specific focus is on helping writers with the collocations of academic English in real time.
Although there are dictionaries and tools that help with collocation, writers are often unaware of them, or simply cannot be bothered to use them. But even if writers get used to consulting these resources, the fact that they have to interrupt their writing to look up a collocation can disrupt the flow of their words. Thus we propose to develop a tool for bringing help with collocation to the user rather than expecting the user to go and find it.
Our research involves investigating user needs, lexicographic data, the visualisation of collocations and human-computer interaction issues.
Meet Our team
Team
Dr Ana Frankenberg-Garcia
Prof. Jonathan C. Roberts
Prof. Robert Lew
Geraint Paul Rees
Dr Javier Pereda
is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council for a period of 36 months.
Keywords: Applied Linguistics, Computer Graphics & Visualisation, Corpus Linguistics, Human Communication in ICT, Language Acquisition.
The AHRC’s Vision and Strategy
and the AHRC Strategy 2013-2018 the Human World (PDF, 3.6MB)
AHRC grant AH/P003508/1Recent activities
Collocaid at 28th Society for Editors and Proofreaders Conference
Collocaid investigator Ana Frankenberg-Garcia presented the seminar “Corpora for Editors” at the 28th Society for Editors and Proofreaders Conference, Wyboston Lakes, 16-18 September 2017. A considerable share of editing and proofreading work is devoted to polishing academic papers, dissertations and theses. Editors and proofreaders can contribute to the development of Collocaid by reporting the miscollocations Read more about Collocaid at 28th Society for Editors and Proofreaders Conference[…]
Collocaid at eLex 2017
Members of the Collocaid team will be presenting at the fifth biennial conference on electronic lexicography, eLex 2017, in Leiden, the Netherlands, 19-21 September 2017. The theme of the conference is electronic lexicography in the 21st Century. In keeping with this theme, we will be presenting our corpus-based project which aims to make lexicographical information Read more about Collocaid at eLex 2017[…]
Collocaid at IEEE Vis ’17
Some Collocaid researchers will be presenting at IEEE Visualisation Conference. These are publications (and happenings) that are associated with conference (IEEE VIS) in early October. The conference is the largest and most important conference on visualisation. Full paper: J. C. Roberts, P. D. Ritsos, J. Jackson, and C. Headleand, “The explanatory visualization framework: An active learning Read more about Collocaid at IEEE Vis ’17[…]