How to express your feelings (with a little help from Google)

Abstract

This paper describes an attempt to capitalize on the vast amount of human-generated text readily available on the Web to help language learners express their own feelings. We avoid errors, idiosyncrasies, and other dross by employing various language and grammar filters. We sort words and phrases by frequency of use to ensure that only very common usage is included. The work is based on a huge collection of n-grams published by Google, along with their frequency on the web. We describe a comprehensive query tool that allows language learners and teachers alike to locate a particular word, its associated phrases, clause patterns, synonyms and antonyms. In addition, we have enabled sample sentences containing these patterns to be retrieved from the Web and presented to the user. Finally, five language activities have been designed to help learners master important vocabulary and expressions. The work is at a preliminary stage and no user tests have yet been performed.