Just the word dictionary

JustTheWord is a completely new kind of aid to help you with
writing English and choosing just the word.

If English is your first language, JustTheWord can help
you express that elusive idea with le mot juste.

If you’re learning English, JustTheWord can justify your choice
of words or suggest improvements — and JustTheWord knows about some common
errors made by speakers of your mother tongue.

When we write, we search our knowledge of words in two ways. We choose
between words that mean similar things. A thesaurus gives us access to
this sort of knowledge. But our choice constrains and is
constrained by the other words in the sentence. We know, or need to know,
which word combinations sound natural. A dictionary gives us access to some of this
sort of knowledge.

By analysing a huge amount of English text, we’ve
built up a highly detailed knowledge base of the word combinations
whose mastery is at the heart of fluent English.

Show combinations

Type a word into the box and hit return or Show Combinations. JustTheWord will
give you a detailed description of the company which that word keeps
in modern-day English. To help you find your way to the information
you need, in the right-hand frame you’ll find the part(s)-of-speech
and the types of relation that the word is found in. If you’re looking
for the right adjective to modify a noun you’ve chosen, click on the
‘ADJ mod <word>’ link. If you want a verb with the noun as its object,
follow the ‘V obj <word>’ link. Within many types of relation you’ll find the uses of the word
clustered into groups with a similar meaning. The words that are not
assigned to a cluster are grouped together at the end of the relation.

After each combination you’ll find its frequency in our corpus, about 80,000,000 words of the British National Corpus (BNC).
The green bar
by each combination gives a measure of how strong it is.
Technically, the bar indicates the t-score. A larger t-score means that the
combination occurs more often than you’d expect given the frequency of the
parts. What you see is only those combinations whose frequency and t-score
exceed certain thresholds. These vary dynamically as we try to show you something
for every word, and not too much for the commoner words.

If you see an inflected form of a word in a combination (or a form
preceded by ‘.’), this means that the combination includes this
precise form. But if a word is in its dictionary form, it may need to
be inflected. Nouns in their dictionary form might also need an
article (and conversely, if an article is present, then the form of
the noun will be as given). You can check the variability of a form, or
any other properties of a combination, by clicking on the combination itself.
This will show you some sentences from our corpus that have been analysed as
containing examples of this combination.

If you want to find out longer combinations involving two words, type
the two words into the box and choose ‘Show Combinations’.

Suggest alternatives

If you type several words into the box and hit return or Suggest
Alternatives, JustTheWord will give you an idea of how well these
words go together — a red bar indicates that the combination is unlikely (the
longer, the unlikelier) — and some suggestions for improvements. For
each word in the input, JustTheWord will try replacing it with a
related word, and show you the strength of the combination in the
usual way (green bars). The blue bars represent the similarity betwen
the original word and its replacement. This feature is still under
development, and you may find it a bit slow. Don’t type too many
words, but do include articles (‘a’, ‘the’, etc.) as this will help
the system to get the right answer.

Confusibles

In the demo we’ve used two types of confusible. Choosing the
‘Thesaurus’ button will use only semantic proximity as a measure of
confusability. Choosing ‘Learner Errors’ will use a corpus of actual
learner errors of all types by speakers of various first languages.
In the future, the learner errors category could be split up into
different types of confusability relation, such as real-word spelling
errors (phonological, orthographic and keyboarding confusibles) and
alternative translations in some context (bilingual confusibles). Such
sets could be further augmented with unattested but predictable
confusibles; and sub-classified into those typified by learners at
certain levels or with certain L1’s.

Credits

SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINES — August 25th, 2013