Our main objective in participating MUC-7 is to investigate and experiment with the use of collocation statistics in information extraction. A collocation is a habitual word combination, such as \weather a storm", \ le a lawsuit", and \the falling yen". Collocation statistics refers to the frequency counts of the collocational relations extracted from a parsed corpus. For example, out of 6577 i...

The present paper elaborates the nature of the Average Collocation Frequency and proposes specific roles for this measure. In addition to its potential as a factor in gauging readability, we propose that the ACF affords a practical measure for estimating the language complexity of texts for use in English language teaching. Particularly, in the context of English as a Second Language, collocati...

This paper is concerned with the ability of lexical semantic classes to predict the behavior of argument structures in productively selecting novel lexical material. It will be argued that while lexical semantic classes can explain a great deal about the spectrum of potential arguments and resulting entailments for those arguments, constructions which are synonymous from a formal semantic persp...

This article focuses on ongoing work done for Portuguese concerning the phenomenon of lexical co-occurrence known as collocation (cf. Cruse, 1986, inter al.). Instances of the syntactic variety formed by noun plus adjective have been especially observed. Collocational instances are not lexical entries, and thus should not be stored in the lexicon as multiword lexical units. Their processing can...

The main aim of the ET-10/?5 project, 'Collocations and the Lexicalisation of Semantic Operations '1, is to evaluate the use of Mel'~uk's analysis of collocations in terms of lexical functions 2, as an interlingun device in a machine translation system. In this poster we only point out the main design issues involved in encoding the essential parts of this analysis in an HPSG-style framework. O...

This paper presents some of the theoretical considerations which have arisen from the author’s learner corpus research over the past couple of years (Philip, 2005a, 2005b, 2006, 2007, in press). In particular, it highlights a mismatch between the language of native speakers and that of learners, not simply at the textual level, but at a more abstract, conceptual level. The findings of this exte...

Properties can be mapped to features in a machine learning algorithm in diierent ways, potentially yielding diierent results. In previous work, we experimented with various approaches to organizing colloca-tional properties into features in a probabilistic classi-er. It was found that one type of organization in particular , which is rarely used in NLP, allows one to take advantage of infrequen...

This paper describes experiments documenting significant variations in word usage patterns within social subgroups of AI researchers. As some phrases have very different collocational patterns than their constituent words, we look beyond occurrences of individual words, to consider word phrases. The mutual information statistic is used to measure the information content of phrases beyond that o...

This paper reports on the annotation and maximum-entropy modeling of the semantics of two German prepositions, mit (‘with’) and auf (‘on’). 500 occurrences of each preposition were sampled from a treebank and annotated with syntactosemantic classes by two annotators. The classification is guided by a perspective of information extraction, relies on linguistic tests and aims at the separation of...

This paper demonstrates a method for creating Japanese learners dictionary of i-adjective-noun collocations. After an introduction of the importance of collocations and the necessity of their inclusion in Japanese language learning, we present various corpora types and corpus query tools that are used to obtain variety of collocational usage in different types of discourse. The Japanese languag...