Collocational Aid for Learners of Japanese as a Second Language

We present Collocation Assistant, a prototype of a collocational aid designed to promote the collocational competence of learners of Japanese as a second language (JSL). Focusing on noun-verb constructions, the tool automatically flags possible collocation errors and suggests better collocations by using corrections extracted from a large annotated Japanese language learner corpus. Each suggestion includes several usage examples to help learners choose the best candidate. In a preliminary user study with JSL learners, Collocation Assistant received positive feedback, and the results indicate that the system is helpful to assist learners in choosing correct word combinations in Japanese.