A comprehensive (?) check of Just-the-Word's current capabilities based on previous comments

[Monica Richards]

Dear Phil and all,

My officemate recommended "Just the Word" to me again today as an alternative to my current practice of teaching ESL students to use COCA (corpus.byu.edu/coca) in order to get their English phrasing questions answered, given COCA's steep learning curve (as well as recent limitations for free users). I have therefore just spent the last three hours getting to know JTW once again and while its easier learning curve is definitely a MAJOR selling point, it appears to me in my (comprehensive?) testing just now of problematic JTW searches suggested by the Google group posts below, there remain several ways in which JTW is more limited than COCA which negatively impact its usefulness for English language learners relative to COCA. If I'm not mistaken, however, many of these current JTW limitations could be easily resolved ☺. Here are JTW's current limitations as I understand them:

• JTW appears unable to search single word conjunctions(?), so learners wanting to check their understanding of how particular conjunctions are used won't be able to do so via JTW:  "I was searching for ALBEIT and THOUGH. . . .All returned blank results. ." (And I just tried to search "notwithstanding," which apparently worked on JTW before, but now doesn't work as far as I can tell)
  
• Some phrases that are, in fact, possible in English (and display in JTW grammar pattern output when just one of their constituent words is searched) do not show up when they are searched directly as a phrase, e.g., "get worse"
• While MANY of the COCA-possible searches I mentioned below in my 2011 post as example ESL student searches JTW couldn't yet help DO now appear searchable via JTW ☺, other multiword combinations searchable in COCA as far as I can tell are still not searchable in JTW: "living different places" (COCA collocates search: "living" and "places" to find how to express the student's intended meaning "living in different places"); Almost of all countries (COCA: * all countries)
• Because JTW isn't designed to provide collocate searches not connected to grammar patterns, it still can't be used to figure out standard idiomatic phrasing a student only partially remembers: "one of my students who yesterday said "isn't there a phrase about breathing someone's neck?"  So I typed in "breathe neck" and clicked alternatives, and it said there were two occurences but then refused to show them to me!"
• JTW appears to be fairly slow in the US (maybe because it has no US mirror site?)
  
• JTW just crashed on me, so I guess I'm done with testing it for the time being ☹ (at least I've finished testing all problematic searches mentioned in this Google group so far)
  
• JTW is a hobby project, so may not be maintained for the long-term unless it gains traction (= financial support) (https://eflnotes.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/interview-with-phil-edmonds-from-just-the-word-com/)
  

I'm now planning to use JTW with my English Writing Consulting students this week instead of COCA in order to do a more comprehensive test of JTW's ability to replace COCA ☺. I (and my boss) would be VERY happy to find a more user-friendly substitute for COCA for EFL/ESL/EIL writing training!

Monica Richards
Ph.D. Candidate in Applied Linguistics and Technology
Iowa State University

[Phil Edmonds]

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestions. It's really helpful to get such detailed information. The answer to most of your questions is that Just The Word is based on real expressions and collocations from real text. If the collocation isn't seen frequently enough in text it won't know about it. This is good because it reflects how language is used. It's maybe not so good since it depends on the corpus used, which in this case is the British National Corpus. There are far bigger corpora available today, including the Internet, but I don't have the time anymore to rebuilt the database from new sources.

It doesn't do conjunctions.

For phrases of 3 or more words, mostly it has phrasal verbs, but not other collocations as in your examples.

And yes it's not a general KWIC tool for searching for idioms. It's focused on grammatical collocations.

Thank you so much, and I hope your students find it useful.

Best,

Phil Edmonds