This paper is an attempt to show that specialized lexical combinations (word groups used in special languages) – even though they share some similarities with collocations (word groups used in general language) – do not behave exactly like them. Thus, they should not be described using the apparatuses lexicographers usually resort to. We will demonstrate that, in most specialized lexical combin...

Collocations are notoriously difficult for non-native speakers to translate, primarily because they are opaque and cannot be translated on a word-by-word basis. We describe a program named Champollion which, given a pair of parallel corpora in two different languages and a list of collocations in one of them, automatically produces their translations. Our goal is to provide a tool for compiling...

This paper presents the COMBINA-PT project, a study of corpus-extracted Portuguese Multiword (MW) expressions. The objective of this on-going project is to compile a large lexical database of multiword (MW) units of the Portuguese language, automatically extracted from a balanced 50 million word corpus, interpreted with lexical association measures and manually validated. MW expressions conside...

The present paper notes that the lexical item PO, literally meaning ‘to break’, bears multiple semantic imports in Mandarin Chinese. Given the lack of well-documented research on the semantics of the lexical item, this paper aims to explore the various meanings of PO. By examining the collocations of PO, thirteen meanings are identified, with predicative and attributive senses. It is proposed t...

Automatic extraction of collocations from large corpora has been the focus of many research efforts. Most approaches concentrate on improving and combining known lexical association measures. In this paper, we describe a genetic programming approach for evolving new association measures, which is not limited to any specific language, corpus, or type of collocation. Our preliminary experimental ...

Arbitrary recurrent word combinations (collocations) are a key in language learning. However, even advanced students have difficulties when using them. Efficient collocation aiding tools would be of great help. Still, existing “collocation checkers” still struggle to offer corrections to miscollocations. They attempt to correct without making any distinction between the different types of error...

Linguistics as a scientific study of human language intends to describe and explain it. However, validity of a linguistic theory is difficult to prove due to volatile nature of language as a human convention and impossibility to cover all real-life linguistic data. In spite of these problems, computational techniques and modeling can provide evidence to verify or falsify linguistic theories. As...

Collocations, i.e., recurrent word combinations such as take advantage (of), strong tea, and deeply absorbed, are receiving increasing attention in SLA research because of their importance to “native-like” production of language. Previous studies suggest that collocations pose a serious challenge to language learners and that learners’ L1 plays a crucial role in this respect. My paper aims to s...