To investigate the effect of massed and distributed collaborative and non-collaborative presentation on L2 learners’ comprehension and production of lexical collocations, 105 participants at Takestan Islamic Azad University in 4 groups were assigned to four different treatment conditions (collaborative-massed; collaborative-distributed; noncollaborative-massed; and noncollaborative-distributed ...

This study aimed to discover the effect of mobile-assisted teaching of collocations on Iranian EFL learners’ reading achievement. For this purpose, a PET test was given to 85 intermediate EFL learners as the proficiency test. After homogenization, 30 female and male students within the age range of 16 to 30 years old from an institute in Alborz Province were selected as the participants in the ...

A number of authors (Lewis 1993, 1997, 2000, Woolard 2001, Thornbury 2002) writing for English language teachers have argued that collocations are arbitrary and therefore there is no point in attempting to explain them to foreign language learners in the classroom. It is my impression that these writers have been very influential with the result that this view of collocation is firmly entrenche...

Collocation extraction systems based on pure statistical methods suffer from two major problems. The first problem is their relatively low precision and recall rates. The second problem is their difficulty in dealing with sparse collocations. In order to improve performance, both statistical and lexicographic approaches should be considered. This paper presents a new method to extract synonymou...

In this paper we discuss the problem of discovering interesting word sequences in the light of two traditions: sequential pattern mining (from data mining) and collocations discovery (from computational linguistics). Smadja (1993) defines a collocation as “a recurrent combination of words that cooccur more often than chance and that correspond to arbitrary word usages.” The notion of arbitrarin...

Automatic extraction of collocations from a corpus is a well-known problem in the field of natural language processing. It is typically carried out by employing some kind of a statistical measure that indicates whether or not two words occur together more often than by chance. A fuzzy set theoretic approach for extracting collocations from a text collection is described in this article. This ap...

Identifying collocations in a sentence, in order to ensure their proper processing in subsequent applications, and performing the syntactic analysis of the sentence are interrelated processes. Syntactic information is crucial for detecting collocations, and vice versa, collocational information is useful for parsing. This article describes an original approach in which collocations are identifi...

Collocations, or restricted lexical co-occurrence, are a difficult issue in natural language processing because their semantics cannot be derived from the semantics of their constituents. Therefore, such verb-noun combinations as “take a break,” “catch a bus,” “have lunch” can be interpreted incorrectly by automatic semantic analysis. Since collocations are combinations frequently used in texts...

Collocations such as heavy rain or make [a] decision, are combinations of two elements where one (the base) is freely chosen, while the choice of the other (collocate) is restricted, depending on the base. Collocations present difficulties even to advanced language learners, who usually struggle to find the right collocate to express a particular meaning, e.g., both heavy and strong express the...