The present study aims at investigating the effect of different levels of lexical collocational density on EFL learners’ reading comprehension. Eighty sophomore students with different levels of proficiency studying at  Zand Institute of Higher Education in Shiraz, Iran were chosen from among eighty five learners based on their score distribution on a reduced TOEFL test constructed by Education...

The focus of this work is statistical idiosyncrasy (or collocational weight) as a discriminant property of multiword expressions. We formalize and model this property, compile a 2-class dataset of MWE and non-MWE examples, and evaluate our models on this dataset. We present a possible empirical implementation of collocational weight and study its effects on identification and extraction of MWEs...

Word reading is heavily influenced by the information provided by previous context. In this study, we analyzed the neurophysiological bases of sentence reading through the EEG activity elicited during reading the same word embedded in differently constraining contexts: a) a low-constraining context; b) a high-constraining semantic compositional context; c) a high-constraining collocational cont...

ryone is fighting a fierce rearguard action struggling towards the objective of a discrete syntactic classes, all the while being forced by practical necessity to move closer and closer toward an analysis of relationships whenever they want to get anything done. Everyone is still trying to find relationships of classes rather than classes of relationships. In n-gram models relationships are use...

One of the main problems for applied natural language processing is gaps in the lexicon, including missing words and word senses, and inadequate descriptions of word use in context. Traditional lexicography has similar concerns. The availability of large, on-line text corpora provides a straightforward tool for enlarging the stock of words included in a lexicon. The identification of additional...

Feature selection in Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is as important as the selection of algorithm to remove sense ambiguity. Bag-of-word (BoW) features comprise the information of neighbors around the ambiguous target word without considering any relation between words. In this study, we investigate the effect of BoW features and Bag-of-bigrams (BoB) on Turkish WSD and compare the results with...

Most of the validation studies conducted across varying test application contexts are usually framed within the traditional conceptualization of validity and therefore lack a comprehensive framework to focus on test score interpretations and test score use. This study aimed at developing and validating a collocational behavior test (CBT), drawing on Kane's argument-based approach to validity. F...

This paper compares several methods (MI, T-score, Dice) for the extraction of collocations and presents a new method called Gravity Counts. The respective methods are evaluated and compared, measuring the combinability and collocability for each pair of words within the moving span of three words in the corpus of “The Times” newspaper for the year 1995. The collocability of words is the basis f...