Refining the Automatic Identification of Conceptual Relations in Large-scale Corpora

In the ACRONYM Project, we have taken the Firthian view (e.g. Firth 1957) that context is part of the meaning of the word, and measured similarity of meaning between words through second-order collocation. Using large-scale, free text corpora of UK journalism, we have generated collocational data for all words except for highfrequency grammatical words, and have found that semantically related word pairings can be identified, whilst syntactic relations are disfavoured. We have then moved on to refine this system, to deal with multi-word terms and identify changing conceptual relationships across time. The system, conceived in the late 80's and developed in 1994-97, differs from others of the 90's in purpose, scope, methodology and results, and comparisons will be drawn in the course of the paper.