Collocations such as heavy rain or make [a] decision, are combinations of two elements where one (the base) is freely chosen, while the choice of the other (collocate) is restricted, depending on the base. Collocations present difficulties even to advanced language learners, who usually struggle to find the right collocate to express a particular meaning, e.g., both heavy and strong express the...

As Chinese text is written without word boundaries, effectively recognizing Chinese words is like recognizing collocations in English, substituting characters for words and words for collocations. However, existing topical models that involve collocations have a common limitation. Instead of directly assigning a topic to a collocation, they take the topic of a word within the collocation as the...

In this article we propose a rank aggregation method for the task of collocations detection. It consists of applying some well-known methods (e.g. Dice method, chi-square test, z-test and likelihood ratio) and then aggregating the resulting collocations rankings by rank distance and Borda score. These two aggregation methods are especially well suited for the task, since the results of each ind...

We present a method of the structural collocations extraction for an inflective language (Polish) based on the process divided into two phases: extraction and filtering of the pairs of wordforms reduced to baseforms and structural annotation of the extracted collocations with lexico-syntactic patterns. The parameters of the patterns are specified manually but their instances are generated and t...

The appropriate use of collocations is a challenge for second language acquisition. However, high quality and easily accessible Chinese collocation resources are not available for both teachers and students. This paper presents the design and construction of a large scale resource of Chinese collocational knowledge, and a web-based application (OCCA, Online Chinese Collocation Assistant) which ...

In the study of collocations and of frozen sentences (idioms, clichés, collocations, many metaphors and figurative meanings, etc.) one often encounters sets of similar forms that cannot be related by formal rules of either type: phrase structure or transformational. We present examples of such situations and we show how the formalism of finite automata can be used to represent them in a natural...

In our daily life, we continually exploit already learned multisensory associations and form new ones when facing novel situations. Improving our associative learning results in higher cognitive capabilities. We experimentally and computationally studied the learning performance of healthy subjects in a visual-auditory sensory associative learning task across active learning, attention cueing l...

This paper introduces Web1T5-Easy, a simple indexing solution that allows interactive searches of the Web 1T 5-gram database and a derived database of quasi-collocations. The latter is validated against co-occurrence data from the BNC and ukWaC on the automatic identification of non-compositional VPC.

Collocation is a linguistic phenomenon that is difficult to define and harder to explain; it has been largely overlooked in the field of computational linguistics due to its difficulty. Although standard techniques exist for finding collocations, they tend to be rather noisy and suffer from sparse data problems. In this paper, we demonstrate that by utilising parsed input to concentrate on one ...

Collocations often comprise two components where one dominates the other in the sense that knowing the dominant one makes it almost inevitable to think of the other one as well. In contrast, knowing the non-dominant component does not necessarily evoke such a strong preference regarding the missing component. In the combination Pyrrhic victory, for example, the first component almost “demands” ...