CoCoCo: Collocations, Colligations, and Constructions
Students who have a great deal of knowledge about a language may still struggle to use it idiomatically, as native speakers do. Instructors teaching a foreign language are often asked how words co-occur. Our goal is to create a technological solution that answers these questions and supports the learning of East Slavic languages: Belarusian (coming soon), Russian, and Ukrainian. The service provides web-based tools that stimulate active, participatory learning. We refer to our mode as interactive learning. In particular, the CoCoCo project encompasses several directions:
- Utilizing large-scale annotated corpora for Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian
- Analyzing word co-occurrences using statistical methods and a corpus-driven approach
- Building a user-friendly learning system that generates answers on demand
Definitions:
Collocations: Collocations are combinations of lexical items that frequently occur together, for example, "make a decision" or "heavy rain."
Colligations: Colligations refer to grammatical structures in which words co-occur, such as the verb "to avoid" followed by a gerund.
Constructions: Constructions are morphosyntactic patterns in which semantic classes of words co-occur in a specific context, for example, "to attract: [problem, damage, harm]."