ARCS blog
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The neural processing of language data.
The Advanced
Reader's Collocation Searcher (ARCS) (C)1997 |
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by Horst Bogatz |
What is a collocation dictionary?
Collocation refers to the sequential co-occurrence possibilities of linguistic units, e.g. noun + noun, adjective + noun, adverb + adjective/adverb, or in some cases non-adjacent ones,e.g. verb + noun, verb + preposition, verb + adverb/ adjective. The ARCS provides, for example, 112 verbs that co-occur with up and/ or down.
There are scales of collocational probability and acceptability. The difference in collocational probability and acceptability between sentences
derives from their referential meaning. Referential restrictions on collocation
demand knowledge of the world, which is changing very fast. New ideas and inventions require new collocations. As a consequence, the ARCS is updated daily.
There are firm or frozen collocations like"crowdsourcing","debt-for nature swap","second lifer","ghost call","unintentional entrepreneur","gastric bypass surgery","time-starved reader","gentrification","Vatican roulette","wealth formation by long-term saving with tax concessions","swine flu","palpable disdain","black swan event","school shooting","deep packet inspection","teotwawki","freegan","surfer's ear", "video snacking","geotagged photo","cruelty-free consumption",or weak collocations like a "big car". Knowledge of collocations is vital for the competent and authentic use of a language: a grammatically correct sentence will stand out as 'awkward' if collocational preferences are violated. This makes collocation an interesting area for language teaching. One of the learner's major
problems is a lack of collocational expertise in English. The Cambridge Learner's Dictionary says that "these word combinations are often difficult to guess, so you need to learn them in order to sound natural in English".
The ARCS is an electronic word combination searcher. It will offer answers to queries concerned with words
that occur together and form one single semantic unit, e.g. "awareness for the
environment" (G. Umweltbewusstsein). Such groups of words are called collocates, i.e. words that are
spontaneously associated with one another or glued together in the minds of native speakers.The
learner will need some degree of prior semantic knowledge about the parts of
the collocation in order to understand the word combination.
Also available are synonyms of such collocations and words
or parts of speech that co-occur with a certain word. For example, the adjective
"particular" collocates with about 500 nouns, on the basis of a text corpus of
over 8 million words. The ARCS covers English/ English as well as German/
English because it provides all probable, acceptable as well as weak and
firm collocations. The German equivalents of the English headwords form semantic
fields or a collection of German collocations.
"Despite the absence of glosses, learners can nonetheless select collocations through a culling process whereby familiar words are contemplated as potential candidates and unknown words ignored." (Nicolas R. Cueto)
The design of the ARCS connects more than 2 million words with the help of more than 58,200 nodes or headwords. "Nodes must be highly clustered - that is, if two nodes are both linked to a third, there must be a high probability that the two are also directly linked. --- Searching our memories for a particular word really entails wandering mentally along links in the network." (A.E. Motter, Y.-C. Lai, P. Dasgupta, From: Nature, Science Update July 24, 2002) Thus The Advanced Reader's Collocation Searcher imitates the mental lexicon. It is really unique. Depending on whether the search starts from a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb, the user looks up a headword (node) in either the Noun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb, Synonym, or German section. A global search can start from English and/ or German words. Also, sample pages have been prepared. They may serve as examples of the 3,000 pages of the ARCS..
Order Information for Research or Commerce
The ARCS has been sponsored by ELDA, i.e. the European Language Distribution Association, which is funded by the European Commission. Copies of the ARCS for research or commerce on CD can be ordered at ELDA.(Note:Enter arcs in the search box OR in the catalogue click on Multilingual Lexicons, then scroll down to M0013)
There is a NEW UPDATED AND EXPANDED VERSION with the FINAL (2006) REFORMED GERMAN SPELLING AND A SEARCH ENGINE FOR SOPHISTICATED SEARCHES.
Don't miss out on this exclusive offer!
Single users may want to
E-MAIL THE AUTHOR
for an exclusive offer.
Comparison of the ARCS with COBUILD, BBI, DOSC
| ARCS | COBUILD | BBI | DOSC | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| nodes | 58,200 | 10,000 | 14,000 | 3,200 |
| collocates per node | up to 500 | up to 20 | up to 20 | up to 20 |
| examples per node | up to 100 | up to ? | up to 20 | up to 20 |
| collocations | about 1,000,000 | about 140,000 | 70,000 | 55,000 |
| German equivalents per node | up to 20 | none | none | none |
| frequencies | none | yes | none | none |
| synonyms per node | up to 50 | none | none | none |
Note: You can search here only a few sample pages, i.e. about 2 per cent of the ARCS.
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