Conventional collocations
Collocations are words which are conventionally used together (e.g. collect data, change dramatically, highly significant, etc.).
Collocation errors
Violating collocation conventions can result in errors (e.g. *depend of something) or awkward, non-idiomatic text (e.g. *a large mistake).
fluent texts
ColloCaid offers thousands of collocation suggestions to help you expand your vocabulary and write more fluently
?The ColloCaid project investigates user needs, the visualisation of lexicographic data and human-computer interaction in the development of a tool to help writers with collocations, i.e., words that are conventionally used together such as 'collect data', 'change dramatically', 'successfully achieved', 'entirely appropriate', and so on. Collocations can be problematic for language learners who cannot recall them as a single chunk. The effective use of collocations can increase the readability and fluency of texts. We have compiled the largest public lexical database of academic English collocations using state-of-the-art lexicography tools and resources, and integrated collocation suggestions into a text editor in a way that helps writers use better collocations as they write. Our proof of concept can be broadened to other languages and usages beyond academic. ColloCaid is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/P003508/).
Team
Dr Ana Frankenberg-Garcia
Prof. Jonathan C. Roberts
Prof. Robert Lew
DR Geraint Paul Rees
Nirwan Sharma
Peter Butcher
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 in IATEFL Voices Magazine
ColloCaid features in the May/June 2021 edition of IATEFL Voices Magazine. The article “Helping writers with academic English collocations” offers an accessible, non-technical account of collocation and how it impacts language use.
ColloCaid at Infolex
On the 12th of April 2021 at 1400 GMT + 1, Geraint Rees gave a seminar talk entitled Collocation and collaboration: Developing the ColloCaid writing assistant. The seminar was hosted by the Infolex research group at the Institut de Lingüística Aplicada, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. More information can be found here. A video can be Read more about ColloCaid at Infolex[…]
ColloCaid code and documentation released
The ColloCaid sample code and documentation has been released. The release includes a fully working implementation of the ColloCaid editor and visualization panel. The ColloCaid editor is a modified version of TinyMCE (https://www.tiny.cloud/) which integrates with the ColloCaid visualization panel, a ReactJS (https://reactjs.org) component that can be used to reproduce the visualizations available in the Read more about ColloCaid code and documentation released[…]
A Unesp Webinar about ColloCaid
On Friday the 5th of February 2021, Ana Frankenberg-Garcia gave a webinar about using ColloCaid in corpus-based translation and teaching pedagogy. The talk was attended by staff and student at Unesp and was followed by an interesting discussion about the ways in which ColloCaid could be employed in the teaching of translation.
Academic Collocation Errors and Other Problems Database Released
Introducing the Academic Collocation Errors and Other Problems by ColloCaid. This dataset comprises 361 collocation errors and other issues found widely and frequently in English academic writing.Problems are classed as: (1) errors like *knowledge in how instead of knowledge of how; (2) atypical word combinations that are grammatically acceptable but not very common, like lose control over (atypical) compared Read more about Academic Collocation Errors and Other Problems Database Released[…]
BALEAP TELSIG webinar about ColloCaid
On Friday, 29 January 2021 at 12:00 pm UK, Ana Frankenberg-Garcia gave a webinar on ColloCaid. Ana presented some practical ideas and activities to help students make the right choices in terms of vocabulary and more specifically collocations in general academic English. Slides from the webinar can be found here. A recording of the presentation Read more about BALEAP TELSIG webinar about ColloCaid[…]
Collocaid at Wales Academic Symposium on Language Technologies 2020
Jonathan Roberts and Peter Butcher presented Collocaid at the Wales Academic Symposium on Language Technologies 2020, that took place on the 4th November 2020. The focus on the symposium was on Language Technologies, including Speech Technology and Translation Technology; Natural Language Processing; and Artificial Intelligence and Language. Professor Roberts said, “It was good presenting ColloCaid at Read more about Collocaid at Wales Academic Symposium on Language Technologies 2020[…]
ColloCaid at the “Incorporating Corpora in Teaching” Symposium
On Friday 23 October, Ana Frankenberg- Garcia gave a presentation at the symposium on “Incorporating Corpora in Teaching” organized by the Mid-Sweden University. She talked about the potential of ColloCaid as a Data-driven Learning (DDL) tool which can help writers with academic collocations without the need for corpus training or teacher intervention.
ColloCaid at the WocDit International Webinar
Ana Frankenberg-Garcia took part in the Working with Corpora and Digital Tools in Language and Translation Studies webinar organised by Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She talked about the challenges academic writing presents to researchers and how ColloCaid can help them overcome some of these challenges.
Professor Roberts talks at the Turing Visualisation Interest Group
The second annual symposium of the Alan Turing Institute Visualization Interest Group (#VizTIG) was held virtually on the 8th September 2020. The fields of data science and artificial intelligence are generating outputs that are too complex for humans to understand in traditional ways. This symposium focused on ways that visualisation with data analysis can help Read more about Professor Roberts talks at the Turing Visualisation Interest Group[…]