Lexical Collocation Analysis

This book re-examines the notion of word associations, more precisely collocations. It attempts to come to a potentially more generally applicable definition of collocation and how to best extract, identify and measure collocations. The book highlights the role played by (i) automatic linguistic annotation (part-of-speech tagging, syntactic parsing, etc.), (ii) using semantic criteria to facilitate the identification of collocations, (iii) multi-word structured, instead of the widespread assumption of bipartite collocational structures, for capturing the intricacies of the phenomenon of syntagmatic attraction, (iv) considering collocation and valency as near neighbours in the lexis-grammar continuum and (v) the mathematical properties of statistical association measures in the automatic extraction of collocations from corpora. This book is an ideal guide to the use of statistics in collocation analysis and lexicography, as well as a practical text to the development of skills in the application of computational lexicography. Lexical Collocation Analysis: Advances and Applications begins with a proposal for integrating both collocational and valency phenomena within the overarching theoretical framework of construction grammar. Next the book makes the case for integrating advances in syntactic parsing and in collocational analysis. Chapter 3 offers an innovative look at complementing corpus data and dictionaries in the identification of specific types of collocations consisting of restricted predicate-argument combinations. This strategy complements corpus collocational data with network analysis techniques applied to dictionary entries. Chapter 4 explains the potential of collocational graphs and networks both as a visualization tool and as an analytical technique. Chapter 5 introduces MERGE (Multi-word Expressions from the Recursive Grouping of Elements), a data-driven approach to the identification and extraction of multi-word expressions from corpora. Finally the book concludes with an analysis and evaluation of factors influencing the performance of collocation extraction methods in parsed corpora.

This book is written for both linguists and computer scientists working in the field of artificial intelligence as well as to anyone interested in intelligent text processing. Lexical function is a concept that formalizes semantic and syntactic relations between lexical units. Collocational relation is a type of institutionalized lexical relations which holds between the base and its partner in a collocation. Knowledge of collocation is important for natural language processing because collocation comprises the restrictions on how words can be used together. The book shows how collocations can be annotated with lexical functions in a computer readable dictionary - allowing their precise semantic analysis in texts and their effective use in natural language applications including parsers, high quality machine translation, periphrasis system and computer-aided learning of lexica. The books shows how to extract collocations from corpora and annotate them with lexical functions automatically. To train algorithms, the authors created a dictionary of lexical functions containing more than 900 Spanish disambiguated and annotated examples which is a part of this book. The obtained results show that machine learning is feasible to achieve the task of automatic detection of lexical functions.

This collection of research articles provides state-of-the-art research in corpus linguistics on lexis and lexico-grammar, focussing on major corpus resources (both corpora and software tools), their theoretical implications and the pedagogical applications of corpus findings.

This book presents a comprehensive description of collocation, covering both the theoretical and practical background and the implications and applications of the concept as language model and analytical tool. It provides a definitive survey of currently available techniques and a detailed description of their implementation.

The present study investigated differences on the knowledge and use of collocations between French and Japanese learners with regard to: 1) L1 influence; and 2) combinability and transparency influence. The test materials included four categories of the lexical collocations: 1) verb + noun; 2) delexicalised verb + noun; 3) adjective + noun; and 4) adverb + adjective. The two types of tasks, Multiple Choice Question Tasks and Translation Tasks, are performed, and the learner corpora are also investigated in order to examine whether the learners from different L1 backgrounds demonstrate different results. Though L1 influence by both French and Japanese learners was demonstrated, the Japanese learners showed a greater L1 influence in the [adjective ] noun] category than the French learners. The investigation also found that L1 influence does not necessarily result in accuracy of the collocations. With regard to the combinability and transparency influence, the results of the two types of tasks followed Kellerman's (1978) remark. However, some contrasted results were also identified in learner corpus investigation. Thus the combinability and transparency influence were not necessarily identified. The results of the present study have a potential to improve teaching/learning of collocations through recognizing the learners' tendencies of learning collocations.

This edited collection presents the state of the art in research related to lexical combinations and their restrictions in Spanish from a variety of theoretical approaches, ranging from Explanatory Combinatorial Lexicology to Distributed Morphology and Generative Lexicon Theory. Section 1 offers a presentation of the main theoretical and descriptive approaches to collocation. Section 2 explores collocation from the point of view of its lexicographical representation, while Section 3 offers a pedagogical perspective. Section 4 surveys current research on collocation in Catalan, Galician and Basque. Collocations and other lexical combinations in Spanish will be of interest to students of Hispanic linguistics.

Collocations are both pervasive in language and difficult for language learners, even at an advanced level. In this book, these difficulties are for the first time comprehensively investigated. On the basis of a learner corpus, idiosyncratic collocation use by learners is uncovered, the building material of learner collocations examined, and the factors that contribute to the difficulty of certain groups of collocations identified. An extensive discussion of the implications of the results for the foreign language classroom is also presented, and the contentious issue of the relation of corpus linguistic research and language teaching is thus extended to learner corpus analysis.