In this contribution we will argue that negative polarity is a collocational phenomenon that does not follow from other properties of the respective lexical elements. With German data as evidence, we will follow a proposal by van der Wouden and treat Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) as collocates which must be licensed by abstract semantic properties of their contexts. Using a collocation module ...

Identifying collocations in a sentence, in order to ensure their proper processing in subsequent applications, and performing the syntactic analysis of the sentence are interrelated processes. Syntactic information is crucial for detecting collocations, and vice versa, collocational information is useful for parsing. This article describes an original approach in which collocations are identifi...

We describe the SUPERSENSELEARNER system that participated in the English allwords disambiguation task. The system relies on automatically-learned semantic models using collocational features coupled with features extracted from the annotations of coarse-grained semantic categories generated by an HMM tagger.

Semiotic interpretation of lexical cohesion is a major research challenge both in theoretical and applied linguistics. From the point of view of usagebased language description, individual lexical units can be roughly characterized by their collocation profiles, i.e., by collections of condensed usage patterns extracted from very large corpora. It is posited that related lexical units tend to s...

A collocation is a habitual word combination. Collocational knowledge is essential for many tasks in natural language processing. We present a method for extracting collocations from text corpora. By comparison with the SUSANNE corpus, we show that both high precision and broad coverage can be achieved with our method. Finally, we describe an application of the automatically extracted collocati...