Seminar: Collocation and collaboration: Developing the ColloCaid writing assistant (G. Rees)
Channel: Grup de recerca InfoLex
Date: 2021-04-12

In this talk, I present ColloCaid (www.collocaid.uk), a collaborative project drawing on expertise from the fields of Language Teaching, Lexicography, and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research. ColloCaid is a digital writing assistant developed to help writers of academic English with collocations. I begin by outlining the rationale underlying its development; stressing the need for a resource that not only makes users aware of gaps in their lexical knowledge, but also allows them to address these gaps without interrupting the writing process. I then present the methodology used to develop and evaluate ColloCaid. The development phase includes the creation of a lexical database containing circa 30,000 academic collocations and genuine examples of collocation use adapted from corpora of academic texts. The evaluation phase involves the application of methods from HCI to assess the usability of the tool. I give practical examples of two key lessons learnt during the development process. Firstly, that concepts from HCI research have exciting potential applications in lexicography, and secondly, that, while undoubtably valuable for lexicographers, methods from Corpus Linguistics and Natural Language Processing must not be adopted uncritically. I conclude the talk by presenting several publicly available datasets resulting from the project and highlighting their potential applications in future research.

Link to article mentioned in the video: https://academic.oup.com/ijl/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ijl/ecaa022/6007986