Using the Web as a Corpus for the Syntactic-Based Collocation Identification

This paper presents an experiment that uses a Web search engine and a robust parser for the Web-based identification of collocations (statistically significant word associations representing “a conventional way of saying things” (Manning and Schütze, 1999)). We identify the possible collocates of a given word by parsing the text snippets returned by the search engine when querying that word. Then, we rank the list of syntactic co-occurrences retrieved according to the collocational strength of each pair by using different statistical measures.