Goal

• Provide comprehensive semantic, phonetic (through video) and pragmatic information on a searched word and visualize pragmatic data in a vertical column chart for viewing ease
• Deployed at: Words in the Wild

Site users

• Learners of English
• Linguistic researchers

Requirements

Python 3.7 or above

Dev Quickstart

• Run pip install -r requirements.txt to install dependencies
• Run flask run to start the development server

Stacks and libraries

• Python/Flask
• PostgreSQL
• Bootstrap
• jQuery
• Axios

Data and API

• Semantic information from a dictionary API (Merriam Webster or Oxford Dictionary of English API)
• Phonetic information from Youglish API (videos of the term being uttered from videos on YouTube)
• Pragmatic data from Sketch Engine API, including the most frequent collocations with the searched word by their grammatical relationship with the searched word

User Flow

• User enters a word to search and the corresponding part of speech
• Click search, or press the enter key to conduct search
• Search will return the definitions of the word, or an error message if the word is not found in the dictionary API
• App will visualize the pragmatic data returned from Sketch Engine, showing the frequency of the most common collocations of the searched word by grammatical relationship
• App will also start auto playing a list of YouTube videos whose caption includes the searched word at the mark of the word being uttered
• Users can sign up for the site to save their searches and make notes on their saved searches

Grammatical Relation Labels

Sketch Engine groups collocations by their relationship to the searched word and has defined a set of short-hand labels for these relationships. Here is a list of the common relationships and their labels:

• modifies: A word that is modified by the searched word
• modifier: A word that modifies the searched word
• and/or: A word that appears in parallel with the searched word connected by conjunctions and and or
• object_of: A predicate that has the searched word as its object
• subject_of: A predicate that has the searched word as its subject
• object: A word that is the object of the searched word
• pp_in-p: A word that appears in a prepositional phrase beginning with the word in that modifies the searched word
  • Example:
    • Searched word: eat
    • pp_in-p: silence (eat in silence)
• pp_of-p: A word that appears in a prepositional phrase beginning with the word of that modifies the searched word
• pp_obj_of-p: A word that appears in a prepositional phrase beginning with the word of that has the searched word as its object
  • Example:
    • Searched word: beauty
    • pp_obj_of-p: queen (queen of beauty)
• adj_subject: A word that is the subject of a searched adjective