This is a corpus-based study of general nouns, ren ‘people’, shi(qing) ‘matter’, and dongxi ‘thing, object’, as they are used in spoken Mandarin in contemporary Taiwan. Our examination focuses on the co-occurrences and collocations of these general nouns with other linguistic elements. Our investigation shows that the three lexical items display different tendencies in designating referential s...

We present an automatic method for weighting the contributions of preference functions used in disambiguation. Initial scaling factors are derived as the solution to a least squares minimization problem, and improvements are then made by hill climbing. The method is applied to disambiguating sentences in the Air Travel Information System corpus, and the performance of the resulting scaling fact...

We present an experiment in extracting collocations from the FrameNet corpus, specifically, support verbs such as direct in Environmentalists directed strong criticism at world leaders. Support verbs do not contribute meaning of their own and the meaning of the construction is provided by the noun; the recognition of support verbs is thus useful in text understanding. Having access to a list of...

The acquisition of linguistic knowledge, i.e., the identication, extraction, and encoding of linguistic information in a corpus, has been one of the main motivations for data-driven approaches to natural language. Methods have been developed for the acquisition of, for instance, parts of speech, noun compounds, collocations, support verbs, subcategorization frames, phrase structure rules, selec...

The paper focuses on selecting an optimal set of the Multiword Expressions Extraction methods used as a tool during wordnet expansion. Wordnet multiword lexical units are a broad class and it is difficult to find a single extraction method fulfilling the task. Many extraction association measures were tested on very large corpora and a very large wordnet, namely plWordNet. Several new measures ...

Monolingual corpora were first thought of as an excellent basis for lexicographical research but, as time went on, research projects extended to various kinds of analysis, from the lexicon, to syntactic patterns to various aspects of text structure. Nowadays the study of the general lexicon covers the analysis of single and multi-word units in context, collocations, lexical groups, lexical 'bun...

Taking the position that writing can be an important skill to foster knowledge building pedagogy, this article explores vocabulary as a supportive tool for this purpose. Having this in mind, a compilation of conceptually loaded vocabularies pertaining to seven discourse communities was developed, two of which were given to a group of L2 writers to investigate the implications of phraseology for...

We present SPred, a novel method for the creation of large repositories of semantic predicates. We start from existing collocations to form lexical predicates (e.g., break ∗) and learn the semantic classes that best fit the ∗ argument. To do this, we extract all the occurrences in Wikipedia which match the predicate and abstract its arguments to general semantic classes (e.g., break BODY PART, ...

This paper presents a novel approach for exploiting the global context for the task of word sense disambiguation (WSD). This is done by using topic features constructed using the latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) algorithm on unlabeled data. The features are incorporated into a modified naı̈ve Bayes network alongside other features such as part-of-speech of neighboring words, single words in the...