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...

As Chinese text is written without word boundaries, effectively recognizing Chinese words is like recognizing collocations in English, substituting characters for words and words for collocations. However, existing topical models that involve collocations have a common limitation. Instead of directly assigning a topic to a collocation, they take the topic of a word within the collocation as the...

In this article we propose a rank aggregation method for the task of collocations detection. It consists of applying some well-known methods (e.g. Dice method, chi-square test, z-test and likelihood ratio) and then aggregating the resulting collocations rankings by rank distance and Borda score. These two aggregation methods are especially well suited for the task, since the results of each ind...

We present a method of the structural collocations extraction for an inflective language (Polish) based on the process divided into two phases: extraction and filtering of the pairs of wordforms reduced to baseforms and structural annotation of the extracted collocations with lexico-syntactic patterns. The parameters of the patterns are specified manually but their instances are generated and t...

In this paper we introduce adaptive vision techniques used, for example, in video-conferencing applications. Radial Basis Function (RBF) networks have been trained for gesture-based communication with colour/motion cues to direct face detection and capture ‘attentional frames’. These focus the processing for Visually Mediated Interaction via an appearance-based approach with Gabor filter coeffi...

Natural languages are full of word collocations that frequently co-occur and correspond to arbitrary word usages. They appear in both technical and non-technical textual corpora and often have specific significance in individual contexts. Accurately retrieving and identifying collocations from a given corpus in an unsupervised manner is imperative to understanding and automatically generating t...

The use of effective multimedia instructions such as mobiles, computers, and the internet in language learning has turned out to be useful since the last decades. The impact of multimedia and synchronous approaches of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' learning of language skills and components has been studied to some extent. However, th...

This paper reports initial research on supporting Visually Mediated Interaction (VMI) by developing person-specific and generic gesture models for the control of active cameras. We describe a time-delay variant of the Radial Basis Function (TDRBF) network and evaluate its performance on recognising simple pointing and waving hand gestures in image sequences. Experimental results are presented t...

This paper reports initial research on supporting Visually Mediated Interaction (VMI) by developing person-specific and generic gesture models for the control of active cameras. We describe a time-delay variant of the Radial Basis Function (TDRBF) network and evaluate its performance on recognising simple pointing and waving hand gestures in image sequences. Experimental results are presented t...