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 (comming 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 avoid followed by -ing forms.

Constructions

Constructions are morphosyntactic patterns in which semantic classes of words co-occur in a specific context, for example, to attract: [problem, damage, harm].