Constructing a Collocation Learning System from the Wikipedia Corpus

Abstract

The importance of collocations for success in language learning is widely recognized. Concordancers, originally designed for linguists, are among the most popular tools for students to obtain, organize, and study collocations derived from corpora. This paper describes the design and development of a collocation learning system that is built from Wikipedia text and provides language learners with an easy-to-use interface for looking up collocations of any word that occurs in Wikipedia. The use of this corpus exposes learners to contemporary, content-related text, and enables them to search for semantically related words for a given topic. The system organizes collocations by syntactic pattern, sorts them by frequency, and links them to their original context. The paper includes a practical user guide to illustrate how to use the system as a language aid to facilitate academic writing.

F-Lingo: Integrating lexical feature identification into MOOC platforms for learning professional and academic English

“…It contains collections of digitized text from a variety of sources, including PhD abstracts from the British Library's E-Theses Online Service [17], online course material from edX and Coursera, and a selection of texts created by their users. F-Lingo also uses the FLAX Learning Collocations database derived from a Wikipedia corpus to retrieve expanded collocations [18]. For example, machine learning method to reduce and machine learning method to analyze are collocations that expand the target collocation machine learning method as can be seen in Fig.…”

Exploring Collocations with The Prime Machine

“…Other kinds of collocation tools that draw on corpora include those that show simplified concordancelinedataandthosethatshowcommonpatterns(multi-wordunits,n-gramsorcollocation lists)ratherthanconcordancelines.AnexampleofasimplifiedconcordancelinetoolisSKELL (Kilgarriff,Marcowitz,Smith,&Thomas,2015).Writingaidsbasedshowingmulti-wordpatterns ofwordsbasedoncorpusdataincludeThe Corpus Based Collocation Tutoring System (Shei&Pain, 2000),Linggle (Boisson,Kao,Wu,Yen,&Chang,2013),FlaxCLS (Shaoqun,Liang,Witten,&Yu, 2016)…”