This study aims at determining whether collocational features automatically extracted from EFL (English as a foreign language) texts are useful for quality scoring, and allow the improvement of a competitive baseline based on, amongst other factors, bigram frequencies. The collocational features were gathered by assigning to each bigram in an EFL text eight association scores computed on the ba...

Properties can be mapped to features in a machine learning algorithm in different ways, potentially yielding different results. In previous work, we experimented with various approaches to organizing collocational properties into features in a probabilistic classifier. It was found that one type of organization in particular, which is rarely used in NLP, allows one to take advantage of infreque...

We present Collocation Assistant, a prototype of a collocational aid designed to promote the collocational competence of learners of Japanese as a second language (JSL). Focusing on noun-verb constructions, the tool automatically flags possible collocation errors and suggests better collocations by using corrections extracted from a large annotated Japanese language learner corpus. Each suggest...

Neighborhood density refers to the number of words that sound similar to a given word. Previous studies have found that neighborhood density influences the recognition of spoken words (Luce & Pisoni, 1998); however, this work has focused almost exclusively on monosyllabic words in English. To investigate the effects of neighborhood density on longer words, bisyllabic words varying in neighborho...

Probabilistic phonotactics refers to the relative frequencies of segments and sequences of segments in spoken words. Neighborhood density refers to the number of words that are phonologically similar to a given word. Despite a positive correlation between phonotactic probability and neighborhood density, nonsense words with high probability segments and sequences are responded to more quickly t...

The effects of orthographic neighborhood density and word frequency in visual word recognition were investigated using distributional analyses of response latencies in visual lexical decision. Main effects of density and frequency were observed in mean latencies. Distributional analyses additionally revealed a density × frequency interaction: for low-frequency words, density effects were mediat...

this study compares and contrasts lexical cohesion in english and persian abstracts of iranian medical students’ theses to appreciate textualization processes in the two languages. for this purpose, one hundred english and persian abstracts were selected randomly and analyzed based on seddigh and yarmohamadi’s (1996) lexical cohesion framework, a version of halliday and hasan’s (1976) and halli...

This study investigates neighbourhood density effects on lexical decision performance (both accuracy and response times) of aphasic patients. Given earlier results on lexical activation and deactivation in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia, the prediction was that smaller neighbourhood density effects would be found for Broca's aphasic patients, compared to age-matched non-brain-damaged control pa...