Extraction of Multi-Word Collocations Using Syntactic Bigram Composition

This paper presents a method for extracting multi-word collocations (MWCs) from text corpora, which is based on the previous extraction of syntactically bound collocation bigrams. We describe an iterative word linking procedure which relies on a syntactic criterion and aims at building up arbitrarily long expressions that represent multi-word collocation candidates. We propose several measures to rank candidates according to the collocational strength, and we present the results of a trigram extraction experiment. The methodology used is particularly well-suited for the identification of those collocations whose terms are arbitrarily distant, due to syntactic processes (passivization, relativization, dislocation, topicalization).