Extraction of V-N-Collocations from Text Corpora: A Feasibility Study for German

The usefulness of a statistical approach suggested by Church and Hanks (1989) is evaluated for the extraction of verb-noun (V-N) collocations from German text corpora. Some motivations for the extraction of V-N collocations from corpora are given and a couple of differences concerning the German language are mentioned that have implications on the applicability of extraction methods developed for English. We present precision and recall results for V-N collocations with support verbs and discuss the consequences for further work on the extraction of collocations from German corpora. Depending on the goal to be achieved, emphasis can be put on a high recall for lexicographic purposes or on high precision for automatic lexical acquisition, in each case leading to a decrease of the corresponding other variable. Low recall can still be acceptable if very large corpora (i.e. 50 100 miUion words) are available or if corpora are used for special domains in addition to the data found in machine readable (collocation) dictionaries.