Korpuspohjaista oppijansanakirjaa tekemässä: esimerkkinä ConLexis
Towards a corpus-based online learner dictionary: ConLexis

Summary/Abstract: The theme of our article is corpus-based learners’ dictionaries. these dictionaries are based on large amounts of digital text and research results on the use of language. These types of dictionaries are still scarce, and are even more so for language learners – for the Finnish language such dictionaries do not exist at all. Additionally, nowadays more and more dictionaries are published in an electronic format, which makes possible many features not available in paper format dictionaries. Large corpora have also had the effect of making phraseology, study of how words are used in context, become an increasingly studied topic, as already shown by some corpus-based dictionaries in the English language. However, it seems that in this respect there is still a lot to hope for: phraseological emphasis is still missing in a significant part of the dictionaries where such emphasis would benefit the learners. In this paper we present the general requirements for electronic dictionaries aimed towards language learners and the design, aims and contents of a new ConLexis web dictionary. ConLexis is aimed for language learners of at least B1 level. However, teachers may use it as supporting material also at lower skill levels. Information presented in the ConLexis word articles is based on extensive corpus analysis, and has a phraseological emphasis. Alongside ConLexis, an exercise material set called ConPraxis is being developed. These together form a corpus-based self-study material for language learners and a teachers’ aid for teachers of Finnish language. Each word article in the dictionary presents the word alongside its definition and conjugations, provides links to synonyms and antonyms and a list of most important collocates. For each of the collocates, a list of example phrases derived from the used corpora is presented. Some of these phrases may be shortened or otherwise slightly altered from the form in which they appear in the corpus, to make them more relevant to the exercise, for example by removing content not necessary for demonstrating the use of the word and its collocate. The ConPraxis exercises in turn contain similarly selected phrases, which have been turned into exercises by removing words that the learner needs to fill in. The dictionary provides an instant feedback mechanism that takes into account typing errors and is able to conjugate words to provide meaningful advice in a majority of situations in which the answer is nearly correct.

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