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...

Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems require access to collocational information to help determine lexical choices constrained both by syntactic and semantic concerns. Constructing linguistic resources to support these decisions can be time-consuming whereas, if the information is extracted automatically, data sparsity limits the variety of the output. This paper reports on a method for ex...

Collocational competence is of critical importance to EFL learners’ language proficiency. Due limited research on L1 influence L2 development receptive and productive knowledge adjective + noun collocations, especially in the context Vietnam, this study an attempt address these gaps by investigating whether Vietnamese learners could recognize use congruent English collocations more accurately t...

In previous work the distance travelled by UK football clubs, and their supporters, over the Christmas/New Year period was minimised. This is important as it is not only a holiday season but, often, there is bad weather at this time of the year. Whilst searching for good quality solutions for this problem, various constraints have to be respected. One of these relates to clashes, which measures...

This paper discusses the lexicographical concept of lexical functions (Mel' cuk and Zolkovsky, 1984) and their potential exploitation in the development of a machine translation lexicon designed to handle collocations. We show how lexical functions can be thought to reeect crosslinguistic meaning concepts for collocational structures and their translational equivalents, and therefore suggest th...

Collocational deficiency is a pervasive phenomenon in learner English. Language learners often fail to choose the correct combination of two or more words due to their unawareness of collocational properties in vocabulary. They are apt to adopt lexical simplification strategies such as using a synonymous or Ll-influenced expression. This paper presents a corpus-based study on the collocational ...

Last night’s Student Life Council meeting resulted in a direct confrontation between students and the faculty-administration members o f the council over the issue of the Board of Trustees’ response to the SLC report on Hall Life. The split began with a motion by Student Body President Dave Krashna to reject the Trustees report, and by the meeting’s close had come close to being reduced to a ch...