Collocations in Knowledge Based Machine Translation

A bstract In order to generate colloquial language within the computational lin­ guistics paradigm the problems o f co-occurrence must be solved. As of yet research on co-occurrence has mostly focused on problems of syntax and selectional restrictions to describe the contextual relation within the sentence. Collocations and idioms have been neatly put aside as a unified problem to be dealt with in the lexicon or not at all. In this paper collocations are defined according to the principles of semantics and a suggestion as to how to work on the retrieval of coUoca^ tions, focussing on adjective noun constructions, from a text corpus will be made. Id io m s a n d c o llo c a t io n s a re tw o v e ry differen t p r o b le m s o n a sem a n tic level. T h e e a r ly d e fin itio n o f c o llo c a tio n s (F ir th 1957, B e n s o n 1985) as b e in g a n y th in g th a t fre q u e n tly c o-o c c u r s ca n n o lo n g e r b e a c c e p te d. T h is d efin ition d isca rd s th e p r in c ip le o f s y n ta c tic a to m s a n d w o u ld th u s in c lu d e su ch freq u en t p a tte rn s as ' it is ' e tc. A d d in g th e co n s tra in t o f a to m ic it y w o u ld elim in a te su ch p a tte rn s bu t w o u ld n g t b e su fficien t t o d istin g u ish b etw een id io m s an d c o llo c a tio n s. C o llo c a t io n s a re a strin g o f w o rd s th a t c o-o c c u r u n d er re strictio n s n …