Classification of Lexical Collocation Errors in the Writings of Learners of Spanish

It is generally acknowledged that collocations in the sense of idiosyncratic word cooccurrences are a challenge in the context of second language learning. Advanced miscollocation correction is thus highly desirable. However, state-of-the-art “collocation checkers” are merely able to detect a possible miscollocation and then offer as correction suggestion a list of collocations of the given keyword retrieved automatically from a corpus. No more targeted correction is possible since state-ofthe-art collocation checkers are not able to identify the type of the miscollocation. We suggest a classification of the main types of lexical miscollocations by US American learners of Spanish and demonstrate its performance.