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What is Platcol?

It is a corpus-based and online Multilingual Platform of Collocations Dictionaries. It is a project financially supported by The São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP - Process No. 2020/01783-2).

So far, PLATCOL is made up of dictionaries in five languages: Portuguese, English, Spanish, French and Chinese, forming different language pairs. In 2025, more languages will be added, such as European Portuguese, Italian and German, and more pairs of languages will be formed.

The PLATCOL will be available for users in 2025.

PLATCOL users

The platform is aimed to be customized for different target audiences according to their needs.

It is specially designed for foreign language learners, foreign language teachers, learner and professional translators, material developers, lexicographers and researchers, or any other target audience who may be interested in learning collocations more deeply.

How did PLATCOL Project come up?

PLATCOL Project is the result of different research carried out by Dr. Adriane Orenha-Ottaiano, from São Paulo State University (UNESP), over the last 15 years. In the past four years, it has been carried out by a great team of researchers from Brazil, Spain, and Canada (Please see our team in the tab above).

What are PLATCOL’s main goals?

It aims to promote learning and translation of collocations more effectively, so that the dictionaries’ users can develop their proficiency in the above-mentioned languages, and thus use the language more naturally and effectively.

As this is the first Multilingual Platform of Collocations Dictionary in the languages above mentioned, especially with a focus on the various types of collocations, we hope to achieve the goal and challenge of meeting the dictionary users’ collocational needs so that they can achieve proficiency and native-like naturalness.

PLATCOL’s Structure and Design

The PLATCOL aims at fulfilling users’ needs regarding language encoding, and, as such, are considered to be a production dictionary. Besides helping users produce more authentic texts, PLATCOL also has the purpose of developing users’ collocational competence, which is intrinsically connected with fluency. The wider the repertoire of collocations, the greater fluency a learner can achieve.

Moreover, the platform is intended to have an easy-to-use layout that offers the possibility of being customized. Since foreign language learners or dictionary users in general encounter challenges in using collocations in their native language, PLATCOL is also designed to display monolingual dictionaries. Thus, it will serve as a monolingual, bilingual or multilingual dictionary (English, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Chinese, European Portuguese, Italian, and German), also taking into account that collocations are automatically activated for each language covered by the platform.

What are Collocations?

The literature on collocations shows that there are two most distinct approaches to operationalize the identification and definition of collocations, and in our research project we will define collocations guided by both.

Under a statistically oriented approach, we view collocations as frequent word combinations whose co-occurrence within a certain distance of each other is statistically higher than expected in comparison to any other words randomly combined in a specific language (Barfield; Gyllstad, 2009; Nesselhauf, 2005; Sinclair 1966, 1991; etc.). However, as Teubert (2004: 188) mentioned being statistically significant is not enough to identify a combination of words as a collocation: ‘They also have to be semantically relevant. They have to have a meaning of their own, a meaning that isn’t obvious from the meaning of the parts they are composed of’.

For this reason, it is important to describe collocations under a phraseological approach, and so we define collocations as pervasive, recurrent, and conventionalized combinations consisting of a base and a collocate (Haussmann 1979, 1989), which are lexically and/or syntactically fixed to a certain degree. They can be said to be partially compositional because its base maintains its meaning, however, the collocate may take on a special meaning only in combination (when only combined) with the base (Alonso-Ramos, 1994; Corpas 1996; Haussmann, 1989; Heylen & Maxwell, 1994; Orenha-Ottaiano, 2020; Pamies, 2019; Penadés Martínez, 2017; Torner & Bernal, 2017).

Collocations may have a (more or less) restricted collocational range and this means that the more general a word (the base) is, the more senses it has and the greater number of collocates it attracts for each sense (à a broad collocational range). On the other hand, the more specific a word is, the fewer senses it has and the fewer number of collocates it attracts (à a narrow collocational range).

They are a language and a culture’s specific combinations and, as such, the collocability of their elements may vary significantly from a language to another, and thus each language is made up of its own collocational networks.

For example, if a learner or a translator wants to express the idea that it is very very cold, as some elementary students may say, he or she could simply use more specific adverbs which could pass on more accurate information to their recipient, such as: It is bitter/extremely/freezing cold (example of an adverbial collocations). If I say mitigating, two words would come up immediately if you are a native speaker of English: factor or circumstance. PLATCOL will help you find the most suitable and frequent lexical items that co-occur with the word you are searching for!

What is the role of collocations in foreign language learning?

In the process of speaking, native speakers do not simply bring separate words together, they also use “prefabricated blocks”, as if they were only one word. Hence, what appears to be spontaneous is actually a stereotyped fixed and repetitive speech, and if the speaker does not have a vast repertoire of these stereotyped fixed units (collocations, for instance) at their disposable, their speech may not sound natural. Thus, the broader the repertoire of collocations, the better a learner will be able to communicate or write in a foreign language. So, that is the importance of and the reason why we compiled a platform like PLATCOL!

What is the role of collocations in translation?

With regard to the translation of collocations, the translator must know more deeply and precisely the collocational network of each language, so that he can produce more idiomatic and fluent texts in the target language. Again, we draw attention to the relevance of PLATCOL!

PLATCOL’s Methodology

PLATCOL’s methodology relies on the combination of automatic methods to extract candidate collocations (Garcia et al., 2019a) with careful post-editing performed by lexicographers. The automatic approaches take advantage of NLP tools to annotate large corpora with lemmas, PoS-tags and dependency relations in five languages (English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Chinese). Using these data, we apply statistical measures (Evert et al., 2017; Garcia et al., 2019b) and distributional semantics strategies to select the candidates (Garcia et al., 2019c) and retrieve corpus-based examples (Kilgarriff et al., 2008). We also rely on automatic definition extraction (Bond & Foster, 2013) so that collocations can be more effectively organized according to their specific senses.

The taxonomy of PLATCOL’s collocations

In order to help the target audience use collocations more precisely and productively, the dictionaries focus on all types of collocations. It covers various syntactic structures of collocations that fit into the following taxonomy:
• Verbal
• Nominal
• Adjectival
• Adverbial
• Complex – identified in some languages so far (Portuguese and Spanish)

To understand more clearly, please check some of the structures of each type of collocations and their examples right below:

Verbal Collocations
• Verb collocate + Noun base: create a platform
• Noun base + Verb collocate: a platform enables
• Verb collocate + Preposition + Noun base: run on a platform
• Verb collocate + Adverbial Particle + Noun base: take over leadership
• Verb collocate + Adverbial Particle + Preposition + Noun base: keep up with inflation

Nominal Collocations
• Noun base + Noun collocate: platform developer
• Noun collocate + Preposition + Noun base: competence in language

Adjectival Collocations
• Adjective collocate + Noun base: digital platform; core competence

Adverbial Collocations
• Adverb collocate + Adjective base: highly competent
• Verb base + Adverb collocate: develop collaboratively
• Adverb collocate + Verb base: jointly develop