Speakers
Description
ONLINE PRESENTATION
In this presentation we describe the DICI-A (Dizionario delle collocazioni italiane per apprendenti), a new learner dictionary of Italian collocations.
The DICI-A includes ca. 11,000 collocations belonging to six syntactic relations: i. Verb + Direct object (mantenere una promessa, ‘to keep a promise’); ii. Adjective + Noun/Noun + Adjective, where the adjective is a modifier before or after a noun (brutta avventura, ‘bad adventure’; tempo libero, ‘free time’); iii. Verb + Adjective (stare zitto, ‘to stay quiet’); iv. Verb + Adverb, (fare presto, ‘to hurry up’); v. Adverb + Adjective (altamente positivo, ‘highly positive’); and vi. Noun + Noun (parco divertimenti, ‘amusement park’).
In the context of Italian phraseological lexicography, in which three different monolingual collocation dictionaries have been published in the last 15 years (Urzì 2009; Tiberii 2012; Lo Cascio 2013), the DICI-A is a lexicographic resource that brings an important added value, since none of the existing dictionaries were specifically aimed at L2 learners, and none were created according to strictly corpus-based criteria.
The presentation will describe the following features of the DICI-A, resulting from methodological choices made during its development:
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it is a corpus-based dictionary: collocations were extracted from an Italian written and spoken reference corpus (Author et al. under review), by integrating measures of frequency and dispersion with association measures (Gablasova et al. 2017; Gries 2024) of exclusivity (Mutual Information; Evert 2005) and strength of association (LogDice; Rychlý 2008);
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the automatically extracted collocations were filtered through a two-step process: a validation against two of the three existing collocation dictionaries, and a human assessment performed by six linguists specialised in phraseology;
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as a dictionary targeted at learners, each entry of the final 11,000 collocational list was assigned to a specific proficiency level (A: base; B; intermediate; and C: advanced) according to the Common European Framework of Reference (Council of Europe 2020), by combining different criteria, such as the rank of collocations in a frequency list, their internal composition, their use by learners at different proficiency levels, attested in a learner corpus of Italian (Author et al. 2023), and their domain of use (La Russa et al. 2023);
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definitions and examples for each of the collocational entries were obtained using Generative AI (Ptasznik et al. 2024): a specific prompt provided through the ChatGPT 4o API interface was found to be effective in producing definitions and examples easily understandable by learners, even at low proficiency levels, as demonstrated by two ad hoc tests (Author et al. 2025).
The DICI-A will be publicly available from the end of 2025 in digital format, and searchable through a dedicated web and mobile interface.
