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Neil McMahon, IHWO,
IH Buenos Aires Teacher Training

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What is StringNet?
An English lexico-grammatical
knowledgebase consisting of
multiword patterns of word
behaviour

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StringNet contains about
two billion
hybrid n-grams extracted from
the British National Corpus
(BNC)

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What are Hybrid n-grams?
The multiword patterns that we
call hybrid n-grams are
sequences of grams which may
consist of…

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(1) specific word forms
(e.g., ‘trying’ but not ‘tried’ or
‘tries’ or ‘try’);

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(2) lexemes (e.g., try, including
its various forms—
trying, tried, etc.);

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or (3) parts of speech
(POSs), marked off in
brackets, including specific POSs
such as [V-ing] or more general
POSs such as [verb], which
cover different more specific
POSs such as [V-ing].

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An example hybrid n-gram is:
take the unprecedented step of
[v-ing]

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take the unprecedented step of [v-ing]
Clicking on the [v-ing] reveals:

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take the unprecedented step of [v-ing]
Clicking on unprecedented reveals:
In the classroom?
Stringnet substitution drills…

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take the unprecedented step of [v-ing]
Clicking on Examples:
In the classroom?
Note their fave example in context
Guess the texts
Read and remember

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Each of the 2 billion patterns in StringNet is indexed
(linked) to other related patterns by four basic types
of relations.
1.Parents: more abstract versions of itself
2.Children: more specific versions of itself
3.Expand: to longer versions of itself
4.Contract: to shorter versions of itself

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take the unprecedented step of [v-ing]
Clicking on Parent:

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take the unprecedented step of [v-ing]
Clicking on Child:

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take the unprecedented step of [v-ing]
Clicking on Expand:

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take the unprecedented step of [v-ing]
Clicking on Contract:

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In the classroom?
There’s a better word for…
Productive feedback

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In the classroom?
Transformations support
Noticing in reading
Pre-teach vocab
Family fortunes
Collocation games
?…?

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Neil McMahon, IHWO,
IH Buenos Aires Teacher Training