This paper combines a corpus-based study of noun+verb collocations with an attempt to distinguish compositional, regularly formed compounds from lexicalised ones. We claim that morphologically regular, compositional compounds share most of their collocational preferences with their compound heads, whereas lexicalised compounds have their own collocational preferences, distinct or only marginall...

The current study is an attempt to investigate the impact of decision-making (selecting and matching) tasks and production (creation of sentences and completion of sentences) tasks on the collocational knowledge of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. To this end, sixty EFL learners were divided into two experimental (decision-making and production) groups. To determine the effects of the tasks, ...

Collocational knowledge is necessary for language generation. The problem is that collocations come in a large variety of forms. They can involve two, three or more words, these words can be of different syntactic categories and they can be involved in more or less rigid ways. This leads to two main difficulties: collocational knowledge has to be acquired and it must be represented flexibly so ...

Word associations are a common tool in research on the mental lexicon. Studies report that bilinguals produce different word associations in their non-native language than monolinguals, and propose at least three mechanisms responsible for this difference: bilinguals may rely on their native associations (through translation), on collocational patterns, and on the phonological similarity betwee...

WordNet is probably the best known lexical resource in Natural Language Processing. While it is widely regarded as a high quality repository of concepts and semantic relations, updating and extending it manually is costly. One important type of relation which could potentially add enormous value to WordNet is the inclusion of collocational information, which is paramount in tasks such as Machin...

This paper describes a characters-based Chinese collocation system and discusses the advantages of it over a traditiolml word-based systcm. Since wordbreaks are not conventionally marked in Chinese text corpora, a character-based collocation system has the dual advantages of avoiding pre-proccssing distortion and directly accessing sub-lexical information. Furthermore, word-based collocational ...

The message, stylistic focus, language and readability of financial reports are good indicators of the perspectives and developments of any company. These indicators can guide companies ̓decision makers to more efficient actions in the dynamic business environment. In this paper, we have studied the language and contents of quarterly financial reports using automated linguistic and text mining ...

Collocational prepositional phrases like ten koste van (at the expense of), met het oog op (with an eye on), and onder het mom van (under the pretext of) are patterns of the form P-NP-P, which have a non-compositional semantics and which are syntactically rigid or idiosyncratic. We present a number of linguistic tests which set such items apart from regularly built prepositional phrases. To fin...