On Collocations and Their Interaction with Parsing and Translation

We address the problem of automatically processing collocations—a subclass of multi-word expressions characterized by a high degree of morphosyntactic flexibility—in the context of two major applications, namely, syntactic parsing and machine translation. We show that parsing and collocation identification are processes that are interrelated and that benefit from each other, inasmuch as syntactic information is crucial for acquiring collocations from corpora and, vice versa, collocational information can be used to improve parsing performance. Similarly, we focus on the interrelation between collocations and machine translation, highlighting the use of translation information for multilingual collocation identification, as well as the use of collocational knowledge for improving translation. We give a panorama of the existing relevant work, and we parallel the literature surveys with our own experiments involving a symbolic parser and a rule-based translation system. The results show a significant improvement over approaches in which the corresponding tasks are decoupled.