Visualisation of Long Distance Grammatical Collocation Patterns in Language

Research in generic unsupervised learning of language structure applied to the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and decipherment of unknown languages has sought to build up a generic picture of lexical and structural patterns characteristic of natural language. As part of this toolkit a generic system is required to facilitate the analysis of behavioural trends amongst selected pairs of terminals and non-terminals alike, regardless of which target natural language was selected. Such a tool may be useful in other areas, such a lexico-grammatical analysis or tagging of corpora. Data-oriented approaches to corpus annotation use statistical n-grams and/or constraint-based models; n-grams or constraints with wider windows can improve error-rates, by examining the topology of the annotation-combination space. We present a visualisation tool to help linguists find "useful" PoS-tag combinations, and cohesion between linguistic annotations at other levels; and suggest some possible applications.