TY - CONF

T1 - ColloCaid: A real-time tool to help academic writers with English collocations”

AU - Lew, Robert

AU - Frankenberg-Garcia, Ana

AU - Rees, Geraint

AU - Roberts, Jonathan C.

AU - Sharma, Nirwan

N1 - Conference code: XVIII

PY - 2018/7/17

Y1 - 2018/7/17

N2 - Writing is a cognitively challenging activity that can benefit from lexicographic support. Academic writing in English presents a particular challenge, given the extent of use of English for this purpose. The ColloCaid tool, currently under development, responds to this challenge. It is intended to assist academic English writers by providing collocation suggestions, as well as alerting writers to unconventional collocations choices as they write. The underlying collocational data are based on a carefully curated set of about 500 collocational bases (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) characteristic of Academic English, and their collocates with illustrative examples. These data have been derived from state-of-the-art corpora of academic English and academic vocabulary lists. The manual curation by expert lexicographers and reliance on specifically Academic English textual resources are what distinguishes ColloCaid from existing collocational resources. A further characteristic of ColloCaid is its strong emphasis on usability. The tool draws on dictionary-user research, findings in information visualization, as well as usability testing specific to ColloCaid in order to find an optimal amount of collocation prompts, and the best way to present them to the user.

AB - Writing is a cognitively challenging activity that can benefit from lexicographic support. Academic writing in English presents a particular challenge, given the extent of use of English for this purpose. The ColloCaid tool, currently under development, responds to this challenge. It is intended to assist academic English writers by providing collocation suggestions, as well as alerting writers to unconventional collocations choices as they write. The underlying collocational data are based on a carefully curated set of about 500 collocational bases (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) characteristic of Academic English, and their collocates with illustrative examples. These data have been derived from state-of-the-art corpora of academic English and academic vocabulary lists. The manual curation by expert lexicographers and reliance on specifically Academic English textual resources are what distinguishes ColloCaid from existing collocational resources. A further characteristic of ColloCaid is its strong emphasis on usability. The tool draws on dictionary-user research, findings in information visualization, as well as usability testing specific to ColloCaid in order to find an optimal amount of collocation prompts, and the best way to present them to the user.

KW - writing assistant

KW - collocation

KW - academic writing

KW - English for academic purposes

KW - visualisation

M3 - Paper

T2 - Proceedings of the XVIII EURALEX International Congress

Y2 - 17 July 2018 through 21 July 2018

ER -