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How can ColloCaid help?

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

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What is ?

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

Principal Investigator
University of Surrey
Reader in Translation Studies at the University of Surrey. Her research focuses on applied uses of corpora in writing, lexicography and translation.

Prof. Jonathan C. Roberts

Co-investigator
Bangor University
Leads the Visualization, Modelling and Graphics Group (VMG) at Bangor, and specialises is in Visual Analytics and HCI among others.

Prof. Robert Lew

Co-investigator
Adam Mickiewicz University
Editor of the International Journal of Lexicography (Oxford University Press). He has also worked as a practical lexicographer for various publishers.

DR Geraint Paul Rees

Researcher
University of Surrey
Research Fellow in Corpus-based Lexicography and Academic Writing at the University of Surrey, UK.

Nirwan Sharma

Researcher
Bangor University
Research Officer in Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization at the School of Computer Science, Bangor University, U.K, and a PhD student in Computing Science.

Peter Butcher

Researcher
Bangor University
Research Officer in Vizualization at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Bangor University, UK, and a PhD student in Computer Science

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)

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