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The Dictionary of Italian Collocations: Design and Integration in an Online Learning Environment

In this paper, I introduce the DICI, an electronic dictionary of Italian collocations designed to support the acquisition of the collocational competence in learners of Italian as a second or foreign language. I briefly describe the composition of the reference Italian corpus from which the collocations are extracted, and the methodology of extraction and filtering of candidate collocations. It is an experimental methodology, based on POS filtering, frequency and statistical measures, and tested on a 12-million-word sample from the reference corpus. Furthermore, I explain the main criteria for the composition of the dictionary, in addition to its integration with a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), aimed at supporting learning activities on collocations. I briefly describe some of the main features of this integration with the VLE, such as the automatic recognition of collocations in written Italian texts, the possibility for students to obtain further linguistic information on selected collocations, and the automatic generation of tests for collocational competence assessment of language learners. While the main goal of the DICI is pedagogical, it is also intended to contribute to research in the field of collocations.