CTIS Seminar: Developing ColloCaid, a Text Editor for Improving Vocabulary and Fluency of Academic Writing
| Dates: | 14 November 2019 |
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| Times: | 14:00 - 15:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Adults, Alumni, Current University students, General public |
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| Speaker: | Ana Frankenberg-Garcia |
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It is widely acknowledged that people less accustomed to academic writing may struggle to employ collocations which more experienced academic writers habitually use, like increase IN speed, DESIGN a system, KEY concept, SUCCESSFULLY achieve or PERFECTLY acceptable. Despite the existence of excellent resources that can be consulted to look up general academic English collocations such as these – for example, dictionaries, corpora and certain online tools – writers may not know where or how to look up collocations, or they may simply not realize that their lexical choices could be enhanced. Another problem is that looking up collocations in the middle of cognitively-demanding writing tasks like essays or research papers can interrupt writers’ thought processes and hamper their ability to get their meanings across.
In response to the above challenges, we are developing ColloCaid, a text editor that assists writers with academic English collocations. By providing collocation prompts and suggestions in real time or for earlier drafts, we aim to help users of academic English convey their intended meanings more successfully, while at the same time enhancing the vocabulary and fluency of their emerging texts.
In this seminar, I will show how ColloCaid works, explain the research on dictionary use, computational lexicography, human-computer interaction and visualization underlying it, and report on results from initial user testing.
At the end of the presentation, there will be an opportunity for the audience to try out a beta version of ColloCaid (if interested, bring your laptop; no software installation is required).
Acknowledgements
The ColloCaid project is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), ref. AH/P003508/1.
Speaker
Ana Frankenberg-Garcia
Organisation: University of Surrey
Biography: ANA FRANKENBERG-GARCIA (PhD in Applied Linguistics, Edinburgh) is Reader in Translation Studies and Programme Leader of the MA in Translation at the University of Surrey. Her research focuses on applied uses of corpora in translation, lexicography and assisted writing. Ana is Principal Investigator of the ColloCaid project. She was also Project Leader of the COMPARA parallel corpus, Chief Editor of the bilingual Oxford Portuguese Dictionary, and Lead Researcher in the Supporting the Internationalization of Brazilian Research project.
Travel and Contact Information
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3.44B
Simon Building
Manchester
