In this paper, we describe an alternative to the kappa statistic for measuring intercoder agreement. We present a model based on the assumption that the observed surface agreement can be divided into (unknown amounts of) true agreement and chance agreement. This model leads to confidence interval estimates for the proportion of true agreement, which turn out to be comparable to confidence inter...

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...

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...

This paper explores the collocational behaviour and semantic prosody of near synonyms from a cross-linguistic perspective. The importance of these concepts to language learning is well recognized. Yet while collocation and semantic prosody have recently attracted much interest from researchers studying the English language, there has been little work done on collocation and semantic prosody on ...

This paper combines a corpus-based study of noun+verb collocations with an attempt to distinguish compositional, regularly formed compounds from lexicalised ones. We claim that morphologically regular, compositional compounds share most of their collocational preferences with their compound heads, whereas lexicalised compounds have their own collocational preferences, distinct or only marginall...

The current study is an attempt to investigate the impact of decision-making (selecting and matching) tasks and production (creation of sentences and completion of sentences) tasks on the collocational knowledge of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. To this end, sixty EFL learners were divided into two experimental (decision-making and production) groups. To determine the effects of the tasks, ...

Collocational knowledge is necessary for language generation. The problem is that collocations come in a large variety of forms. They can involve two, three or more words, these words can be of different syntactic categories and they can be involved in more or less rigid ways. This leads to two main difficulties: collocational knowledge has to be acquired and it must be represented flexibly so ...

Word associations are a common tool in research on the mental lexicon. Studies report that bilinguals produce different word associations in their non-native language than monolinguals, and propose at least three mechanisms responsible for this difference: bilinguals may rely on their native associations (through translation), on collocational patterns, and on the phonological similarity betwee...