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.
Team
Dr Ana Frankenberg-Garcia
Prof. Jonathan C. Roberts
Prof. Robert Lew
Geraint Paul Rees
Nirwan Sharma
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 the 18th International EURALEX Congress
ColloCaid co-investigator Professor Robert Lew gave a presentation about the ColloCaid project at the 18th International EURALEX Congress in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The presentation addressed the background and rationale of the project, the steps involved in curating the lexicographical data, and the steps taken to ensure that the tool is user-friendly and minimally distracting to users Read more about ColloCaid at the 18th International EURALEX Congress[…]
ColloCaid at TaLC 2018
On Friday the 20th of July 2018, ColloCaid principal investigator Ana Frankenberg-Garcia and researcher Geraint Rees presented a paper about the ColloCaid project at TaLC 2018 in Cambridge, United Kingdom. The paper focused on the role of the ColloCaid tool in helping academic writers acquire collocations. It also outlined the rationale underlying the tool’s lexicographic Read more about ColloCaid at TaLC 2018[…]
ColloCaid at ASIALEX 2018
On Saturday the 9th of June 2018, ColloCaid co-investigator Professor Robert Lew gave a presentation about the ColloCaid project at ASIALEX 2018 in Krabi, Thailand. As well as setting out the rationale behind the project, Professor Lew outlined the methodology used to create the tool before ending the presentation with a short video demo of Read more about ColloCaid at ASIALEX 2018[…]
ColloCaid at the BAAL CL SIG event ‘New Directions in DDL’
On Friday the 8th of June the ColloCaid team took part in the BAAL Corpus Linguistics SIG Event ‘New Directions in DDL’. In our presentation New directions in DDL for EAP writers we presented the ColloCaid tool as a means of Data Driven Learning; helping learners engage with corpus data dynamically in such a way Read more about ColloCaid at the BAAL CL SIG event ‘New Directions in DDL’[…]
ColloCaid in Brazil
ColloCaid principal investigator Ana Frankenberg-Garcia recently undertook a week-long research stay at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil, where she worked with researchers investigating the problems Brazilian students studying at UK universities experience with collocations when writing in English. During her stay she gave a talk about the challenges and benefits Read more about ColloCaid in Brazil[…]
ColloCaid at TechLING’17
On Friday the 10th of November 2017 Ana Frankenberg-Garcia gave an invited talk entitled Combining user needs, lexicographic data and digital writing environments at the University of Bologna, Forlì Campus. The talk placed the ColloCaid project in the wider context of the development of monolingual learner dictionaries. Tracing the evolution of such lexical resources from Read more about ColloCaid at TechLING’17[…]
ColloCaid at ULisboa
Ana Frankenberg-Garcia gave a talk entitled Practical Applications of Corpora at Universidade de Lisboa on Monday the 23rd of October 2017. ColloCaid featured prominently as an innovative example of a corpus-driven approach employed to solve a real-world problem. The project aims to help EAP writers express themselves more quickly, accurately, and idiomatically. Exploiting the possibilities Read more about ColloCaid at ULisboa[…]
Report: ColloCaid at IEEE Vis ’17
Professor Jonathan C. Roberts presented the poster: “Visualisation and graphical techniques to help writers write more idiomatically,” (Roberts, Frankenberg-Garcia, Lew, Rees, & Pereda, 2017) at the IEEE Conference on Visualization (VIS) in Pheonix Arizona. A video preview of the poster can be found here. IEEE VIS 2017 is the premier forum for advances in visual analytics, Read more about Report: ColloCaid at IEEE Vis ’17[…]
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[…]