SkELL (abbreviation of ''Sketch Engine for Language Learning'') is a free corpus-based web tool that allows language learners and

teachers A teacher, also called a schoolteacher or formally an educator, is a person who helps students to acquire knowledge, competence, or virtue, via the practice of teaching. ''Informally'' the role of teacher may be taken on by anyone (e.g. whe ...

find authentic sentences for specific target word(s). For any word or a phrase, SkELL displays a

concordance Concordance may refer to: * Agreement (linguistics), a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase * Bible concordance, an alphabetical listing of terms in the Bible * Concordant coastline, in geology, where beds, or la ...

that lists example sentences drawn from a special text corpus crawled from the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

, which has been cleaned of

spam Spam may refer to: * Spam (food), a canned pork meat product * Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages ** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages ** Messaging spam, spam targeting users of instant messaging ( ...

and includes only high-quality texts covering everyday, standard, formal, and professional language. There are versions of SkELL for

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

, Russian,

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...

, Italian, Czech and

Estonian Estonian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Estonia, a country in the Baltic region in northern Europe * Estonians, people from Estonia, or of Estonian descent * Estonian language * Estonian cuisine * Estonian culture See also

...

. SkELL is based on the commercial Sketch Engine corpus manager and the proprietary GDEX (Good Dictionary Examples) score that it implements.

Features

SkELL can provide three kinds of results for a query: * Examples: This page displays a

created by searching for the specified word or phrase in the reference corpus, taking any derived forms into account. * Word sketch: This page shows the most frequent collocates for the specified word. It is a simplified version of Sketch Engine's

word sketch A word sketch is a one-page, automatic, corpus-derived summary of a word’s grammatical and collocational behaviour. Word sketches were first introduced by the British corpus linguist Adam KilgarriffKilgarriff, Adam; Rychlý, Pavel; Smrž, Pavel; ...

function. * Similar words: This page contains visualization of similar (not necessarily just

synonym A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. For example, in the English language, the words ''begin'', ''start'', ''commence'', and ''initiate'' are all ...

ous) words in a

word cloud A tag cloud (also known as a word cloud, wordle or weighted list in visual design) is a visual representation of text data, which is often used to depict keyword metadata on websites, or to visualize free form text. Tags are usually single word ...

, based on Sketch Engine's distributional thesaurus. The number of displayed lines in a concordance is limited to 40. However, the

frequency Frequency is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit of time. It is also occasionally referred to as ''temporal frequency'' for clarity, and is distinct from ''angular frequency''. Frequency is measured in hertz (Hz) which is eq ...

of the searched query in the reference corpus is indicated above the concordance as '' hits per million''.

Use

It has been suggested that SkELL can be used, for instance: * to obtain illustrative examples of target features,

lexical Lexical may refer to: Linguistics * Lexical corpus or lexis, a complete set of all words in a language * Lexical item, a basic unit of lexicographical classification * Lexicon, the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge * Lexical ...

and

grammatical In linguistics, grammaticality is determined by the conformity to language usage as derived by the grammar of a particular variety (linguistics), speech variety. The notion of grammaticality rose alongside the theory of generative grammar, the go ...

; * to find authentic sentences for the target word(s); * to help students understand the meaning and/or usage of a word or phrase; * to help teachers wanting to use example sentences in a class; * to discover and explore collocates; * to create gap-fill exercises; * to have the students find and investigate examples/collocates; * to draw sentences to be used for translation exercises; * to teach various kinds of

homonym In linguistics, homonyms are words which are homographs (words that share the same spelling, regardless of pronunciation), or homophones (equivocal words, that share the same pronunciation, regardless of spelling), or both. Using this definition, ...

s and polysemous words;

Data

For each language, SkELL uses a dedicated text corpus, which can also be searched manually in the Sketch Engine using more powerful tools. For example, the English Corpus for SkELL includes a total of more than 57 million sentences that contain more than one billion words. It is based on the English Wikipedia (a special selection of 130,000 articles), a subset from the English web corpus enTenTen14, the whole of the British National Corpus, and free news sources. The English collection of

Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg (PG) is a Virtual volunteering, volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the ...

used to be a part of the corpus as well, but was removed due to its too archaic language.

History

SkELL was first presented in 2014, when only

was supported. In 2015, support for Russian was added, and Czech has been supported since 2017.

, Italian and

...

were added in 2018.

References

{{Reflist

External links

SkELL – corpus tool for language learnersSkELL: corpus examples for language learning
Vocabulary Concordances (publishing) Language learning software Language-learning websites Online dictionaries Online English dictionaries Russian dictionaries German dictionaries Italian dictionaries Czech dictionaries Estonian dictionaries Internet properties established in 2014 Czech educational websites