Automated Collocation Suggestion for Japanese Second Language Learners

This study addresses issues of Japanese language learning concerning word combinations (collocations). Japanese learners may be able to construct grammatically correct sentences, however, these may sound “unnatural”. In this work, we analyze correct word combinations using different collocation measures and word similarity methods. While other methods use well-formed text, our approach makes use of a large Japanese language learner corpus for generating collocation candidates, in order to build a system that is more sensitive to constructions that are difficult for learners. Our results show that we get better results compared to other methods that use only wellformed text.