The importance of collocations in the context of second language learning is generally acknowledged. Studies show that the “collocation density" in learner corpora is nearly the same as in native corpora, i.e., that use of collocations by learners is as common as it is by native speakers, while the collocation error rate in learner corpora is about ten times as high as in native reference corpo...

The importance of collocations in the context of second language learning is generally acknowledged. Studies show that the “collocation density" in learner corpora is nearly the same as in native corpora, i.e., that use of collocations by learners is as common as it is by native speakers, while the collocation error rate in learner corpora is about ten times as high as in native reference corpo...

Collocations are notoriously difficult for non-native speakers to translate, primarily because they are opaque and can not be translated on a word by word basis. We describe a program named Champollion which, given a pair of parallel corpora in two different languages, automatically produces translations of an input list of collocations. Our goal is to provide a tool to compile bilingual lexica...

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...

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 ...

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...