Sentence Analysis and Collocation Identification

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 identified in a sentence as soon as possible during the analysis of that sentence, rather than at the end of the analysis, as in our previous work. In this way, priority is given to parsing alternatives involving collocations, and collocational information guide the parser through the maze of alternatives. This solution was shown to lead to substantial improvements in the performance of both tasks (collocation identification and parsing), and in that of a subsequent task (machine translation).