Thematic analysis is best manifested by contrasting collocations1 such as “shipping pacemakers” vs. “shipping departments”. While in the first pair, the pacemakers are being shipped, in the second one, the departments are probably engaged in some shipping activity, but are not being shipped. Text pre-processors, intended to inject corpus-based intuition into the parsing process, must adequately...

Collocations often comprise two components where one dominates the other in the sense that knowing the dominant one makes it almost inevitable to think of the other one as well. In contrast, knowing the non-dominant component does not necessarily evoke such a strong preference regarding the missing component. In the combination Pyrrhic victory, for example, the first component almost “demands” ...

Language-endowed intelligent agents benefit from leveraging lexical knowledge falling at different points along a spectrum of compositionality. This means that robust computational lexicons should include not only the compositional expectations of argument-taking words, but also non-compositional collocations (idioms), semi-compositional collocations that might be difficult for an agent to inte...

Collocations, the combination of specific words are quite useful linguistic resources for NLP in general. The purpose of this paper is to show their usefulness, exemplifying an application to Kanji character decision processes for Japanese word processors. Unlike recent trials of automatic extraction, our collocations were collected manually through many years of intensive investigation of corp...

one of the most problematic areas in foreign language learning is collocation. it is often seen as arbitrary and an overwhelming obstacle to the achievement of nativelike fluency. current second language (l2) instruction research has encouraged the use of collaborative output tasks in l2 classrooms. this study examined the effects of two types of output tasks (editing and cloze) on the learning...