The Japanese lexicon consists of Japanese-origin words (WAGO), Chinese-origin words (KANGO) and words borrowed from English and other European languages (GAIRAIGO). The acquisition of words from three sources results in the abundance of near synonyms without any clear rules when a particular synonym should be used. Loveday has hypothesized that WAGO/KANGO and GAIRAIGO concrete nouns are used to...

The meaning of such verb-noun collocations as the wind blows, time flies, the day passes by can be generalized as ‘what is designated by the noun exists’. Likewise, the meaning of make a decision, provide support, write a letter can be generalized as ‘make what is designated by the noun’. These generalizations represent the meaning of certain groups of collocations and may be used as semantic a...

We address the problem of automatically processing collocations—a subclass of multi-word expressions characterized by a high degree of morphosyntactic flexibility—in the context of two major applications, namely, syntactic parsing and machine translation. We show that parsing and collocation identification are processes that are interrelated and that benefit from each other, inasmuch as syntact...

Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) has been frequently used in EAP classrooms and re-examined in light of various domain-specific corpora. Although well-received, the AWL has been criticized for ignoring the fact that words tend to show irregular distributions and be used in different ways across disciplines (Hyland and Tse, 2007). One such difference concerns collocations. Academic word...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce an alternative word association measure aimed at addressing the under-extraction collocations that contain high frequency words. While measures such as MI provide the important contribution of filtering out sheer high frequency of words in the detection of collocations in large corpora, one side effect of this filtering is that it becomes correspondingl...

For extracting collocations from the Internet, it is necessary to numerically estimate the cohesion between potential collocates. Mutual Information cohesion measure (MI) based on numbers of collocate occurring closely together (N12) and apart (N1, N2) is well known, but the Web page statistics deprives MI of its statistical validity. We propose a family of different measures that depend on N1,...

The usefulness of a statistical approach suggested by Church and Hanks (1989) is evaluated for the extraction of verb-noun (V-N) collocations from German text corpora. Some motivations for the extraction of V-N collocations from corpora are given and a couple of differences concerning the German language are mentioned that have implications on the applicability of extraction methods developed f...

A challenging task in Chinese collocation extraction is to improve both the precision and recall rate. Most lexical statistical methods including Xtract face the problem of unable to extract collocations with lower frequencies than a given threshold. This paper presents a method where HowNet is used to find synonyms using a similarity function. Based on such synonym information, we have success...

This paper describes the application of filtering techniques to collocation sets calculated for very large text corpora. Additional information like patterns, grammatical information, subject areas and numerical values associated with the collocations are used to identify collocations with given semantic structure. Various examples and different techniques for applying such filters are describe...

This paper presents a method of retrieving bilingual collocations of a verb and its objective noun from cross-lingual documents with similar contents. Relevant documents are obtained by integrating crosslanguage hierarchies. The results showed a 15.1% improvement over the baseline nonhierarchy model, and a 6.0% improvement over use of relevant documents retrieved from a single hierarchy. Moreov...