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...

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 ...

CDB is a relational database designed for the particular needs of representing lexical collocations. The relational model is defined such that competence-based descriptions of collocations (the competence base) and actually occurring collocation examples extracted from text corpora (the example base) complete each other. In the paper, the relational model is described and examples for the repre...

In the past decade, statistical machine translation (SMT) has been advanced from word-based SMT to phraseand syntax-based SMT. Although this advancement produces significant improvements in BLEU scores, crucial meaning errors and lack of cross-sentence connections at discourse level still hurt the quality of SMT-generated translations. More recently, we have witnessed two active movements in SM...

Based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional and Van Dijk’s “ideological square” model of Critical Discourse Analysis, this study is aimed to analyze a self-built corpus which comprised 29 news reports extracted from western newspapers 48 Chinese under the approach discursive practice, power ideology. To that end, analysis conducted comparative keywords key clusters lists, collocations “China is, Ch...

A central belief of the learning sciences is that learning is situated within communities of practice. This paper demonstrates a method for modeling learning within an online discourse community as two intersecting phenomena: members’ trajectories of participation and change in the community’s language norms. Using the word2vec algorithm, a language model is trained on 12 million comments over ...

Collocational deficiency is a pervasive phenomenon in learner English. Language learners often fail to choose the correct combination of two or more words due to their unawareness of collocational properties in vocabulary. They are apt to adopt lexical simplification strategies such as using a synonymous or Ll-influenced expression. This paper presents a corpus-based study on the collocational ...

This paper describes how to automatically classify the functional relations from the Factotum knowledge base via a statistical machine learning algorithm. This incorporates a method for inferring prepositional relation indicators from corpus data. It also uses lexical collocations (i.e., word associations) and class-based collocations based on the WordNet hypernym relations (i.e., is-subset-of)...

Recent works in the NLP community show an increasing interest for the analysis of discourse structure, leading to a variety of models and applications. We claim that a constraint-based approach allows a high level, abstract, description of various discourse structures, together with the design of an operative framework for generic analysis methods. The CDML formalism (Constraint-based Discourse...

Collocations have recently received increased attention in applied linguistic studies; however, still relatively little is known about the way in which collocations are used by speakers of foreign languages. This article provides an overview of the research which has been carried out in this area, and makes some suggestions as to the directions for future investigations. Collocations are unders...