The lexical items like and well can serve as discourse markers (DMs), but can also play numerous other roles, such as verb or adverb. Identifying the occurrences that function as DMs is an important step for language understanding by computers. In this study, automatic classifiers using lexical, prosodic/positional and sociolinguistic features are trained over transcribed dialogues, manually an...

This paper addresses the problem of how to identify the intended meaning of individual words in unrestricted texts, without necessarily having access to complete representations of sentences. To discriminate senses, an understander can consider a diversity of information, including syntactic tags, word frequencies, collocations, semantic context, role-related expectations, and syntactic restric...

One of the most common and persistent error types in second language writing is collocation errors, such as learn knowledge instead of gain or acquire knowledge, or make damage rather than cause damage. In this work-inprogress report, we propose a probabilistic model for suggesting corrections to lexical collocation errors. The probabilistic model incorporates three features: word association s...

We participated in SemEval-1 English coarse-grained all-words task (task 7), English fine-grained all-words task (task 17, subtask 3) and English coarse-grained lexical sample task (task 17, subtask 1). The same method with different labeled data is used for the tasks; SemCor is the labeled corpus used to train our system for the allwords tasks while the labeled corpus that is provided is used ...

There is insufficient rigorous research examining which features of EFL/ESL learners’ writing can be improved through their awareness/knowledge of collocation. This study, therefore, addressed this issue and examined the effect of this awareness on Iranian EFL learners’ writing performance with respect to the specific features of each writing sub-component (i.e., content, organization, vocabula...

Interests in examining the roles of receptive vocabulary knowledge and collocational competence on EFL learners’ proficiency have grown considerably; yet, extent how noun, verb-noun collocations, noun-preposition collocations impact their English skill performances is still insufficiently researched. To address such gaps, this study specifically explored Thai nouns its performances. Three types...

A series of different automatic query expansion techniques has been suggested in Information Retrieval. To estimate how suitable a document term is as an expansion term, the most popular of them use a measure of the frequency of the co-occurrence of this term with one or several query terms. The benefit of the use of the linguistic relations that hold between query terms is often questioned. If...

Collocations constitute a subclass of multi-word expressions that are particularly problematic for machine translation, due 1) to their omnipresence in texts, and 2) to their morpho-syntactic properties, allowing virtually unlimited variation and leading to long-distance dependencies. Since existing MT systems incorporate mostly local information, these are arguably ill-suited for handling thos...