CoCoCo: Collocations, Colligations, and Constructions
Students who have a great deal of knowledge about the language on the theoretical level may be unable to use it idiomatically, in a way native speakers can. Instructors teaching a foreign language are regularly asked how words co-occur. Our goal is to create a technological solution that answers these questions and revolutionizes learning of East-Slavic languages. We provide web-based tools that stimulate active, participatory learning. We refer to our target mode of learning as inter-active learning. In particular, the CoCoCo project encompasses several directions:
- Utilizing large-scale annotated corpora
- 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 frequently occurring together, like "make a decision" or "heavy rain."
Colligations: Colligations refer to grammatical structures where words co-occur, such as a verb 'to avoid' followed by a gerund.
Constructions: Constructions are morphosyntactic patterns where semantic classes of words co-occur in specific context, for example "to attract: [problem, damage, harm]".