Exploiting long distance collocational relations in predictive typing

In this paper, we report about some preliminary experiments in which we tried to improve the performance of a state-of-the-art Predictive Typing system for the German language by adding a collocation-based prediction component. This component tries to exploit the fact that texts have a topic and are semantically coherent. Thus, the appearance in a text of a certain word can be a cue that other, semantically related words are likely to appear soon. The collocation-based module exploits this kind of topical/semantic relatedness by relying on statistics about the co-occurrence of words within a large window of text in the training corpus. Our current experimental results indicate that using the collocationbased prediction module has a small but consistent positive effect on the performance of the system.