Predicting Strong Associations on the Basis of Corpus Data

Current approaches to the prediction of associations rely on just one type of information, generally taking the form of either word space models or collocation measures. At the moment, it is an open question how these approaches compare to one another. In this paper, we will investigate the performance of these two types of models and that of a new approach based on compounding. The best single predictor is the log-likelihood ratio, followed closely by the document-based word space model. We will show, however, that an ensemble method that combines these two best approaches with the compounding algorithm achieves an increase in performance of almost 30% over the current state of the art.