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...

While large-scale corpora and various corpus query tools have long been recognized as essential language resources, the value of word association norms as language resources has been largely overlooked. This paper conducts some initial comparisons of the lexical relationships observed within Japanese collocation data extracted from a large corpus using the Japanese language version of the Sketc...

We argue that lexical association measures (AMs) should be evaluated against a reference set of collocations manually extracted from the full candidate data, and that the notion of collocation needs to be precisely defined so that human collocativity judgments and experimental results are reproducible. We show that identification results achieved by particular AMs do not crucially depend on tex...

We present in this paper a method for achieving in an integrated way two tasks of topic analysis: segmentation and link detection. This method combines word repetition and the lexical cohesion stated by a collocation network to compensate for the respective weaknesses of the two approaches. We report an evaluation of our method for segmentation on two corpora, one in French and one in English, ...

Most existing systems for automatically extracting lexical-semantic resources neglect multi-word expressions (MWEs), even though approximately 30% of gold-standard thesauri entries are MWEs. We present a distributional similarity system that identifies synonyms for MWEs. We extend Grefenstette’s SEXTANT shallow parser to first identify bigram MWEs using collocation statistics from the Google WE...

This paper assesses the degree to which established practices in terminology can provide the translation industry with the lexical means to support mediation of information between languages, especially where such mediation involves modification. The effects of term variation, collocation and sublanguage phraseology present problems of term choice to the translator. Current term resources canno...

Text segmentation is a fundamental problem in natural language processing, which has application in information retrieval, question answering, and text summarization. Almost previous works on unsupervised text segmentation are based on the assumption of lexical cohesion, which is indicated by relations between words in the two units of text. However, they only take into account the reiteration,...

Automatic extraction of collocations from large corpora has been the focus of many research efforts. Most approaches concentrate on improving and combining known lexical association measures. In this paper, we describe a genetic programming approach for evolving new association measures, which is not limited to any specific language, corpus, or type of collocation. Our preliminary experimental ...

Abstract We describe tools for the extraction of collocations not only in the form of word combinations, but also of data about the morphosyntactic properties of collocation candidates. Such data are needed for a detailed lexical description of collocations, and to support both their recognition in text and the generation of collocationally acceptable text. We describe the tool architecture, re...