We propose a new measure of constructional saliency for use with Web-data, which corrects for infrequent forms. The measure attempts to incorporate both collocational information as well as frequency of use for the whole construction. We report on results for a case study of the so-called dative alternation in English, and show that our measure of saliency indicates that not only do specific ve...

In the ACRONYM Project, we have taken the Firthian view (e.g. Firth 1957) that context is part of the meaning of the word, and measured similarity of meaning between words through second-order collocation. Using large-scale, free text corpora of UK journalism, we have generated collocational data for all words except for highfrequency grammatical words, and have found that semantically related ...

Identifying multiword expressions (MWEs) in a sentence in order to ensure their proper processing in subsequent applications, like machine translation, and performing the syntactic analysis of the sentence are interrelated processes. In our approach, priority is given to parsing alternatives involving collocations, and hence collocational information helps the parser through the maze of alterna...

Abstract In word association tasks, participants respond with the first that comes to mind on seeing a given cue. These responses are generally assumed be influenced by number of factors, including cue semantics, form, and textual distribution. Previous studies exploring third these influences have used pairwise measures, such as mutual information, evaluate extent which distributions influence...

The Complete Tang Poems (CTP) is the most important source to study Tang poems. We look into CTP with computational tools from specific linguistic perspectives, including distributional semantics and collocational analysis. From such quantitative viewpoints, we compare the usage of “wind” and “moon” in the poems of Li Bai (李白) and Du Fu (杜甫). Colors in poems function like sounds in movies, and ...

Word sketches are part of the Sketch Engine corpus query system. They represent automatic, corpus-derived summaries of the words’ grammatical and collocational behaviour. Besides the corpus itself, word sketches require a sketch grammar, a regular expression-based shallow grammar over the part-of-speech tags, to extract evidence for the properties of the targeted words from the corpus. The pape...

The article investigates how different factors such as word predictability and part of speech may affect word duration in Estonian speech. The material comes from corpora of read texts. On the example of the five most frequent words in the material (eesti 'Estonian', ei 'not', ja 'and', on 'is; are', see 'it; this') the correlation of the predictability and duration of words is studied. It is c...