Writing is a cognitively challenging activity that can benefit from lexicographic support. Academic writing
in English presents a particular challenge, given the extent of use of English for this purpose. The ColloCaid
tool, currently under development, responds to this challenge. It is intended to assist academic English writers
by providing collocation suggestions, as well as alerting writers to unconventional collocational choices as
they write. The underlying collocational data are based on a carefully curated set of about 500 collocational
bases (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) characteristic of academic English, and their collocates with illustrative
examples. These data have been derived from state-of-the-art corpora of academic English and academic vocabulary
lists. The manual curation by expert lexicographers and reliance on specifically Academic English
textual resources are what distinguishes ColloCaid from existing collocational resources. A further characteristic
of ColloCaid is its strong emphasis on usability. The tool draws on dictionary-user research, findings in
information visualization, as well as usability testing specific to ColloCaid in order to find an optimal amount
of collocation prompts, and the best way to present them to the user