In this paper, we show that the Lexical Functions (LFs) of the Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary are well suited for addressing some lexical questions in text generation like collocations and textual phenomena. We first describe LFs and divide them into two subsets: paradigmatic LFs and syntagmatic LFs. In particular, we see how paradigmatic LFs can be used for coreferential relations and de...

The customization of Machine Translation systems concentrates, for the most part, on MT dictionaries. In this paper, we focus on the customization of complex lexical entries that involve various types of lexical collocations, such as sub-categorization frames. We describe methods and tools that leverage existing parsers and other MT dictionaries for customization of MT dictionaries. This custom...

There is a certain consensus on some defining features of collocations (they are frequent, recurrent, conventional, institutionalized, etc.), but there is not much agreement on other characteristics, for example whether or not they constitute binary lexical relations, and — crucially— whether they are arbitrary, and must be stipulated, or should instead be deduced or inferred. I will argue that...

We extend a lexical knowledge-base of near-synonym differences with knowledge about their collocational behaviour. This type of knowledge is useful in the process of lexical choice between near-synonyms. We acquire collocations for the near-synonyms of interest from a corpus (only collocations with the appropriate sense and part-of-speech). For each word that collocates with a nearsynonym we us...

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...

This paper discusses the lexicographical concept of lexical functions (Mel'~uk 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 reflect cross-linguistic meaning concepts for collocational structures and their translational equivalents, and therefore suggest t...

Multi-word units are lexical units that are written as more than one word. They constitute a rather heterogeneous class, whose only unifying feature is that they represent a mismatch between orthographic representation and lexical units. Included in this class are syntactically governed combinations (e.g. correspond with), complex prepositions (e.g. in spite of), collocations (e.g. put into pra...

Extensive knowledge of collocations is a key factor that distinguishes learners from fluent native speakers. Such knowledge is difficult to acquire simply because there is so much of it. This paper describes a system that exploits the facilities offered by digital libraries to provide a rich collocation-learning environment. The design is based on three processes that have been identified as le...

This article outlines a quantitative method for segmenting texts into thematically coherent units. This method relies on a network of lexical collocations to compute the thematic coherence of the different parts of a text from the lexical cohesiveness of their words. We also present the results of an experiment about locating boundaries between a series of concatened texts. 1 I n t r o d u c t ...

It is generally acknowledged that collocations in the sense of idiosyncratic word cooccurrences are a challenge in the context of second language learning. Advanced miscollocation correction is thus highly desirable. However, state-of-the-art “collocation checkers” are merely able to detect a possible miscollocation and then offer as correction suggestion a list of collocations of the given key...