This work presents an initial investigation on how to distinguish collocations from free combinations. The assumption is that , while free combinations can be literally translated, the overall meaning of collocations is different from the sum of the translation of its parts. Based on that, we verify whether a machine translation system can help us perform such distinction. Results show that it ...

In this paper, we propose a new approach to identify unknown words in Chinese. This approach adopts an n-grams program to sort out the collocating word / character sequences which are possible words and phrases in Chinese. In addition to proposing the criteria for identifying Chinese new words, was also classify these new words according to their structural and semantic characteristics. The cor...

This paper presents a hybrid method for extracting Chinese noun phrase collocations that combines a statistical model with rule-based linguistic knowledge. The algorithm first extracts all the noun phrase collocations from a shallow parsed corpus by using syntactic knowledge in the form of phrase rules. It then removes pseudo collocations by using a set of statistic-based association measures (...

This research study focuses on the discourse of a community of student teachers and a peer tutor in an English language teaching teacher education programme. The chief aims of this study are (1) to examine the features of the discourse in online and face-to-face modes of communication, (2) to investigate the community practices, and extrapolate how the student teachers and the peer tutor build ...

Research hitherto has tended to show that, like vocabulary errors, wrong collocations are often due to transfer from L1, and hence that greater typological difference from the target language leads to more serious collocational errors. We tested this hypothesis by comparing the collocational errors of Swedish and Chinese students. 100 university students from each environment wrote a short essa...

The Japanese lexicon consists of Japanese-origin words (WAGO), Chinese-origin words (KANGO) and words borrowed from English and other European languages (GAIRAIGO). The acquisition of words from three sources results in the abundance of near synonyms without any clear rules when a particular synonym should be used. Loveday has hypothesized that WAGO/KANGO and GAIRAIGO concrete nouns are used to...

The meaning of such verb-noun collocations as the wind blows, time flies, the day passes by can be generalized as ‘what is designated by the noun exists’. Likewise, the meaning of make a decision, provide support, write a letter can be generalized as ‘make what is designated by the noun’. These generalizations represent the meaning of certain groups of collocations and may be used as semantic a...

We address the problem of automatically processing collocations—a subclass of multi-word expressions characterized by a high degree of morphosyntactic flexibility—in the context of two major applications, namely, syntactic parsing and machine translation. We show that parsing and collocation identification are processes that are interrelated and that benefit from each other, inasmuch as syntact...

Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) has been frequently used in EAP classrooms and re-examined in light of various domain-specific corpora. Although well-received, the AWL has been criticized for ignoring the fact that words tend to show irregular distributions and be used in different ways across disciplines (Hyland and Tse, 2007). One such difference concerns collocations. Academic word...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce an alternative word association measure aimed at addressing the under-extraction collocations that contain high frequency words. While measures such as MI provide the important contribution of filtering out sheer high frequency of words in the detection of collocations in large corpora, one side effect of this filtering is that it becomes correspondingl...