FLAX Shaoqun Wu and Ian H. Witten Computer Science Department Waikato University New Zealand Utilizing lexical data from a web-derived corpus to expand productive collocation knowledge

FLAX Shaoqun Wu and Ian H. Witten Computer Science Department Waikato University New Zealand Utilizing lexical data from a web-derived corpus to expand productive collocation knowledge 500M word sequences One trillion words strong tea vs powerful computer heavy rain vs big storm

FLAX contemporary arts building  contemporary art gallery a fancy and good position  a unique position important events in their times  events of that time reinforce the income  increase the income help common people  help ordinary people the essay favour  I favour the influence created by  the influence exerted by in the other hand  on the other hand play an important role on  play an important role in the argument may be true  the argument may be valid are aware of a lot  are fully aware of more likely to be preserve  more likely to be preserved

agenda  Trillion word corpus  1B 5-grams  500M 5-word phrases  30M collocations  Searchable digital library collections  Web phrases  Web collocations  Examples of usage  Evaluation with  students  teachers

where’s NZ?

what’s FLAX?

FLAX One trillion words  One billion 5-grams

FLAX One billion 5-grams 500M five-word sequences 150,000-word vocab BNC Web phrases grams Web collocations Classified by part of speech 30M collocations

FLAX Web collocations

FLAX Web collocations

FLAX … play an important role on … … is equal important to … … contain range of … Web phrases demo

FLAX cause + Noun You are very beautiful … Web collocations spend the tour demo

FLAX  IELTS writing task  9 students  Samples of written text  Teacher identified 108 errors …  … and marked them  90% were correctible by the system  Of these, students actually corrected 70%  100% of verb + preposition errors  60% of verb + noun errors Evaluation

FLAX contemporary arts building  contemporary art gallery a fancy and good position  a unique position important events in their times  events of that time reinforce the income  increase the income help common people  help ordinary people the essay favour  I favour the influence created by  the influence exerted by in the other hand  on the other hand play an important role on  play an important role in the argument may be true  the argument may be valid are aware of a lot  are fully aware of more likely to be preserve  more likely to be preserved

Summary  Trillion word corpus  1B 5-grams  500M 5-word phrases  30M collocations  Searchable digital library collections  Web phrases  Web collocations  Examples of usage  Evaluation with  students  teachers

FLAX this afternoon … FLAX workshop: 14:30 Building language material and creating exercises with FLAX