DICI-A Dictionary of Italian Collocations for Learners

The main goal of the project is to create and make public the DiCI-A (Dictionary of Italian Collocations for Learners), a dictionary of collocations specifically designed for learners of Italian as a second language. The DICI-A aims to be a freely accessible digital dictionary that can be searched through an interface accessible from both desktop and mobile devices. The project seeks to fill a gap in the field of Italian lexicography, which currently does not offer tools for collocations specifically designed for learners, based on balanced written and spoken corpora, and designed according to rigorous statistical and lexicographic methods, in which collocations are graded according to proficiency level. 

Some features of the dictionary are: 

• it is corpus-based (the collocations are extracted from a reference corpus of contemporary Italian);
• it is based on statistical methodologies (collocations are filtered and ranked based on their frequency, their dispersion across different textual genres in the corpus, and specific association measures);
• each collocation included in the DICI-A is assigned to a level of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), and is accompanied by a definition and authentic examples;
• the structure of the dictionary complies with international standards set for digital lexicography;
• the usability of the dictionary is ensured through a mobile application, allowing learners to consult it in a guided and intuitive way, either individually or in a classroom learning context. Consultation will also be available through a web platform.