In this paper, we describe an algorithm that employs syntactic and statistical analysis to extract bilingual collocations from a parallel corpus. The preferred syntactic patterns are obtained from idioms and collocations in a machine-readable dictionary. Phrases matching the patterns are extract from aligned sentences in a parallel corpus. Those phrases are subsequently matched up via cross-lin...

The main aim of the ET-10/?5 project, 'Collocations and the Lexicalisation of Semantic Operations '1, is to evaluate the use of Mel'~uk's analysis of collocations in terms of lexical functions 2, as an interlingun device in a machine translation system. In this poster we only point out the main design issues involved in encoding the essential parts of this analysis in an HPSG-style framework. O...

This paper presents a Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach to filter Named Entities (NE) from a list of collocation candidates. The NE are defined as the names of ’People’, ’Places’, ’Organizations’, ’Software’, ’Illnesses’, and so forth. The proposed method is based on statistical measures associated with Web resources to identify NE. Our method has three stages: (1) Building artificial ...

This paper reports on experiments in classifying the semantic role annotations assigned to prepositional phrases in both PENN TREEBANK (version II) and FRAMENET (version 0.75). In both cases, experiments are done to see how the prepositions can be classified given the dataset’s role inventory, using standard word-sense disambiguation features, such as the parts of speech of surrounding words, a...

Natural languages are full of collocations, recurrent combinations of words that co-occur more often than expected by chance and that correspond to arbitrary word usages. Recent work in lexicography indicates that collocations are pervasive in English; apparently, they are common in all types of writing, including both technical and nontechnical genres. Several approaches have been proposed to ...

Statistical-based collocation extraction approaches suffer from (1) low precision rate because high co-occurrence bi-grams may be syntactically unrelated and are thus not true collocations; (2) low recall rate because some true collocations with low occurrences cannot be identified successfully by statistical-based models. To integrate both syntactic rules as well as semantic knowledge into a s...

The present work is a pilot study of English lexical collocations in written productions by advanced Italian students of English. The aim is to describe errors made by learners in the production of word combinations. First a working definition of lexical collocation will be given in order to identify those word combinations that will be taken into consideration. Then, after introducing the data...

Collocation has been considered a problematic area for L2 learners. Various studies have been conducted to investigate native speakers‘ (NS) and non-native speakers‘ (NNS) use of different types of collocations (e.g., Durrant and Schmitt, 2009; Laufer and Waldman, 2011).These studies have indicated that, unlike NS, NNS rely on a limited set of collocations and tend to overuse them. This raises ...

This article discusses the detection of discourse markers (DM) in dialog transcriptions, by human annotators and by automated means. After a theoretical discussion of the definition of DMs and their relevance to natural language processing, we focus on the role of like as a DM. Results from experiments with human annotators show that detection of DMs is a difficult but reliable task, which requ...

The purpose of our paper is to illustrate the fundamental importance of developing academic community among first-year students. We argue that a sense of academic community is of fundamental importance in combating the effects of the neo-liberal economic discourse on higher education, and that the values of higher education are incongruent with those of economic rationalism. The discursive comm...