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PolyU Library

Online Tools for Assignment

Introduce useful online tools that may help to prepare your assignment.

Linggle


Linggle is an English grammar and linguistic search engine developed by the Natural Language Processing Lab of National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. It helps you check word choice, usage and collocations in order to make your writing more natural. The suggested results are from several corpora like Google Web 1T 5-gram, British National Corpus, New York Times Annotated Corpus.


 

Linggle offers some simple searching operators to allow you to quickly find how the words are actually used in the real world. Let's explore what Linggle can do for us from the examples below:

Linggle provides an example of how to find suitable words by typing _ in the search box:


 

In addition to using a single "_" to represent a single word, you can also use * to represent zero or more words. Below is an example searched with "achieve * progress". Don't forget to click on the  Show  button to view the word or phrase in some real examples.

 

* Note: You can only search a maximum of 5 words. No result will be displayed if there are over 5 words in a single query.

You can add ~ before the word to find synonyms (i.e. words with similar meanings) of the word in Linggle. Below is an example searching with "~huge effort":

Don't forget to click on the  Show  button to view the word or phrase in some real examples.

 

* Note: You can only search a maximum of 5 words. No result will be displayed if there are over 5 words in a single query.

Linggle provides an example of how to check whether a word is needed by adding ? before the word:


 

The contrast between the count and ratio of the two phrases in the example shows that the preposition “about” is rarely needed after “discuss”. Don't forget to click on the  Show  button to view the word or phrase in some real examples.

 

* Note: You can only search a maximum of 5 words. No result will be displayed if there are over 5 words in a single query.

Linggle provides an example of how to choose alternative words by adding / between the alternative words:

 

Phrases with a high frequency are usually preferred. Don't forget to click on the  Show  button to view the word or phrase in some real examples.

 

* Note: You can only search a maximum of 5 words. No result will be displayed if there are over 5 words in a single query.

Linggle provides an example of how to search for word with specific part of speech (POS) in a query:

 

 

You may find a list of POS below. All of them must end with a dot(.):

  • v. = verb
  • b. = noun
  • adj. = adjective
  • adv. = adverb
  • prep. = preposition
  • conj. = conjunction
  • pron. = pronoun
  • det. = determiner

 

* Note: You can only search a maximum of 5 words. No result will be displayed if there are over 5 words in a single query.


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Except where otherwise noted, the content of this guide is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.