Drawing on the assumptions of socio-cognitive linguistics, focusing on the effective role of interaction in terms of reducing the cognitive burden in the process of learning, this quasi-experimental study aimed at investigating the effect of the Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) usage on the learning and retention of non-congruent collocations among 60 homogenized Iranian EFL learners, aged 18 to 24...

A number of authors (Lewis 1993, 1997, 2000, Woolard 2001, Thornbury 2002) writing for English language teachers have argued that collocations are arbitrary and therefore there is no point in attempting to explain them to foreign language learners in the classroom. It is my impression that these writers have been very influential with the result that this view of collocation is firmly entrenche...

Automatic extraction of collocations from a corpus is a well-known problem in the field of natural language processing. It is typically carried out by employing some kind of a statistical measure that indicates whether or not two words occur together more often than by chance. A fuzzy set theoretic approach for extracting collocations from a text collection is described in this article. This ap...

Identifying collocations in a sentence, in order to ensure their proper processing in subsequent applications, and performing the syntactic analysis of the sentence are interrelated processes. Syntactic information is crucial for detecting collocations, and vice versa, collocational information is useful for parsing. This article describes an original approach in which collocations are identifi...

Collocations, or restricted lexical co-occurrence, are a difficult issue in natural language processing because their semantics cannot be derived from the semantics of their constituents. Therefore, such verb-noun combinations as “take a break,” “catch a bus,” “have lunch” can be interpreted incorrectly by automatic semantic analysis. Since collocations are combinations frequently used in texts...

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...

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...

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...

Collocation extraction systems based on pure statistical methods suffer from two major problems. The first problem is their relatively low precision and recall rates. The second problem is their difficulty in dealing with sparse collocations. In order to improve performance, both statistical and lexicographic approaches should be considered. This paper presents a new method to extract synonymou...