Collocation Extraction Based on Modifiability Statistics

We introduce a new, linguistically grounded measure of collocativity based on the property of limited modifiability and test it on German PP-verb combinations. We show that our measure not only significantly outperforms the standard lexical association measures typically employed for collocation extraction, but also yields a valuable by-product for the creation of collocation databases, viz. possible structural and lexical attributes. Our approach is language-, structure-, and domain-independent because it only requires some shallow syntactic analysis (e.g., a POS-tagger and a phrase chunker).