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 focuses on the development of a text-editing tool to help writers with collocations, i.e., a text editor that helps writers find words that go well together, such as 'collect data', 'change dramatically', 'successfully achieved', 'entirely appropriate', and so on. Our research involves investigating user needs, the visualisation of lexicographic data and human-computer interaction, and compiling a large database of collocation suggestions using state-of-the-art e-lexicography tools and resources. We help writers by raising awareness of collocations they may not remember to use or know where to look up, in a way that does not disrupt their writing. Collocations typically used by expert writers in authentic texts are integrated into a text editor, so that writers can access them as they write. Although ColloCaid only covers academic English, our proof of concept can be broadened to other languages and usages beyond academic.
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 at Cambridge ELT
Kirsten Sutton writes about ColloCaid in her blog “Natural-sounding English: how to find the words that collocate” See the post on the Cambridge World of Better Learning blog.
ColloCaid at TaLC 2020
Ana Frankenberg-Garcia and colleagues have a paper at the TaLC 2020 conference which is taking place online this year. This paper reports on a series academic English writing workshops that encouraged researchers and English tutors in Brazil to work collaboratively with corpus tools and resources. This collaborative approach is particularly important in the Brazilian context Read more about ColloCaid at TaLC 2020[…]
ColloCaid Webinar
Ana Frankenberg-Garcia gave a webinar about ColloCaid as part of a series of webinars celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Graduate Program in Applied Linguistics (LAEL), Pontifical Catholic University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. The webinar took place from 9am – 11am (GMT -3) (1300 – 1400 BST). You can find more information and recordings of Read more about ColloCaid Webinar[…]
ColloCaid Guest Lecture at EMLex
ColloCaid Principal Investigator Ana Frankenberg-Garcia gave a guest lecture for the European Master in Lexicography (EMLex). For the academic year 2019-2020, the Faculty of Philology at the University of Santiago de Compostela plays host to EMLex. The guest lecture entitled Assisting Writers with Academic English Collocations: lexical data, text editor integration and user feedback, took Read more about ColloCaid Guest Lecture at EMLex[…]
ColloCaid at The University of Cambridge
On Monday 27 January, ColloCaid Principal Investigator Ana Frankenberg-Garcia gave a talk about the project at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She talked about the difficulty writers less accustomed to the academic register face when producing collocations, and how ColloCaid can help. More information can be found here.
ColloCaid at The University of Manchester
On Thursday the 15th of November, ColloCaid Principal Investigator Ana Frankenberg-Garcia gave a seminar talk at the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester. Her talk explained the research on dictionary use, computational lexicography, human-computer interaction and visualization underlying ColloCaid, and reported on results from initial user testing. At the end Read more about ColloCaid at The University of Manchester[…]
ColloCaid at Vis4DH2019
The ColloCaid team presented a paper titled “Co-creating an online learning environment to support academic writing: Lessons learnt in an interdisciplinary setting” at the 2019 Visualisation for Digital Humanities (Vis4DH) workshop that was co-located with the IEEE VIS (visualisation) conference, and held at the Vancouver Convention Centre East. The workshop took place on Sunday 20th October Read more about ColloCaid at Vis4DH2019[…]
ColloCaid at eLex 2019
The ColloCaid team were in Sintra taking part in eLex 2019. On September 30th, at the pre-conference workshop on Collocations in Lexicography, we presented a paper about lessons from Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research for the presentation of collocations in e-lexicography. We drew heavily on examples from the development of ColloCaid to show how concepts Read more about ColloCaid at eLex 2019[…]
ColloCaid at EUROCALL2019
On Thursday 29th of August, Ana Frankenberg-Garcia presented ColloCaid at the 27th EUROCALL conference hosted by UCLouvain in collaboration with KU Leuven, in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. The first part of the presentation focused on the compilation of the lexicographic database underlying ColloCaid using existing academic word lists, corpora and lexical analysis software. It then explained how Read more about ColloCaid at EUROCALL2019[…]
ColloCaid at the 28th PASE Conference
On 28 June 2019, Robert Lew gave a presentation about the ColloCaid tool at the 28th PASE Conference, Poznań, Poland. He talked about the need for ColloCaid, problems inherent in existing resources, and the construction of the lexicographic database which underlies the tool. He also reported on recent usability studies involving the tool. Further information Read more about ColloCaid at the 28th PASE Conference[…]