Collocation refers to the sequential co-occurrence possibilities of linguistic units, e.g. noun + noun, adjective + noun, adverb + adjective/adverb, or in some cases non-adjacent ones,e.g. verb + noun, verb + preposition, verb + adverb/ adjective. The ARCS provides, for example, 112 verbs that co-occur with up and/ or down.

There are scales of collocational probability and acceptability. The difference in collocational probability and acceptability between sentences derives from their referential meaning. Referential restrictions on collocation demand knowledge of the world, which is changing very fast. New ideas and inventions require new collocations. As a consequence, the ARCS is updated daily.

There are firm or frozen collocations like”staycation”,”crowdsourcing”,”debt-for nature swap”,”second lifer”,”ghost call”,”unintentional entrepreneur”,”gastric bypass surgery”,”time-starved reader”,”gentrification”,”Vatican roulette”,”wealth formation by long-term saving with tax concessions”,”swine flu”,”palpable disdain”,”black swan event”,”school shooting”,”deep packet inspection”,”teotwawki”,”freegan”,”surfer’s ear”, “video snacking”,”geotagged photo”,”cruelty-free consumption”,or weak collocations like a “big car”. Knowledge of collocations is vital for the competent and authentic use of a language: a grammatically correct sentence will stand out as ‘awkward’ if collocational preferences are violated. This makes collocation an interesting area for language teaching. One of the learner’s major problems is a lack of collocational expertise in English. The Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary says that “these word combinations are often difficult to guess, so you need to learn them in order to sound natural in English”.

The ARCS is an electronic word combination searcher. It will offer answers to queries concerned with words that occur together and form one single semantic unit, e.g. “awareness for the environment” (G. Umweltbewusstsein). Such groups of words are called collocates, i.e. words that are spontaneously associated with one another or glued together in the minds of native speakers.The learner will need some degree of prior semantic knowledge about the parts of the collocation in order to understand the word combination. Also available are synonyms of such collocations and words or parts of speech that co-occur with a certain word. For example, the adjective “particular” collocates with about 500 nouns, on the basis of a text corpus of over 8 million words. The ARCS covers English/ English as well as German/ English because it provides all probable, acceptable as well as weak and firm collocations. The German equivalents of the English headwords form semantic fields or a collection of German collocations.

“Despite the absence of glosses, learners can nonetheless select collocations through a culling process whereby familiar words are contemplated as potential candidates and unknown words ignored.” (Nicolas R. Cueto)

The design of the ARCS connects more than 2 million words with the help of more than 68,000 nodes or headwords. “Nodes must be highly clustered – that is, if two nodes are both linked to a third, there must be a high probability that the two are also directly linked. — Searching our memories for a particular word really entails wandering mentally along links in the network.” (A.E. Motter, Y.-C. Lai, P. Dasgupta, From: Nature, Science Update July 24, 2002) Thus The Advanced Reader’s Collocation Searcher imitates the mental lexicon. It is really unique. Depending on whether the search starts from a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb, the user looks up a headword (node) in either the Noun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb, Synonym, or German section. A global search can start from English and/ or German words. Also, sample pages have been prepared. They may serve as examples of the 3,800 pages of the ARCS..