The appropriate use of collocations is a challenge for second language acquisition. However, high quality and easily accessible Chinese collocation resources are not available for both teachers and students. This paper presents the design and construction of a large scale resource of Chinese collocational knowledge, and a web-based application (OCCA, Online Chinese Collocation Assistant) which ...

Collocations are notoriously difficult for non-native speakers to translate, primarily because they are opaque and can not 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, automatically produces translations of an input list of collocations. Our goal is to provide a tool to compile bilingual lexica...

In the study of collocations and of frozen sentences (idioms, clichés, collocations, many metaphors and figurative meanings, etc.) one often encounters sets of similar forms that cannot be related by formal rules of either type: phrase structure or transformational. We present examples of such situations and we show how the formalism of finite automata can be used to represent them in a natural...

Collocation is a linguistic phenomenon that is difficult to define and harder to explain; it has been largely overlooked in the field of computational linguistics due to its difficulty. Although standard techniques exist for finding collocations, they tend to be rather noisy and suffer from sparse data problems. In this paper, we demonstrate that by utilising parsed input to concentrate on one ...

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...

CDB is a relational database designed for the particular needs of representing lexical collocations. The relational model is defined such that competence-based descriptions of collocations (the competence base) and actually occurring collocation examples extracted from text corpora (the example base) complete each other. In the paper, the relational model is described and examples for the repre...

Collocational deficiency is a pervasive phenomenon in learner English. Language learners often fail to choose the correct combination of two or more words due to their unawareness of collocational properties in vocabulary. They are apt to adopt lexical simplification strategies such as using a synonymous or Ll-influenced expression. This paper presents a corpus-based study on the collocational ...

This paper describes how to automatically classify the functional relations from the Factotum knowledge base via a statistical machine learning algorithm. This incorporates a method for inferring prepositional relation indicators from corpus data. It also uses lexical collocations (i.e., word associations) and class-based collocations based on the WordNet hypernym relations (i.e., is-subset-of)...

Collocations have recently received increased attention in applied linguistic studies; however, still relatively little is known about the way in which collocations are used by speakers of foreign languages. This article provides an overview of the research which has been carried out in this area, and makes some suggestions as to the directions for future investigations. Collocations are unders...

This paper proposes a new method to find correspondences of uninterrupted collocations from Japanese-English bilingual corpora without sentence-to-sentence alignment. Uninterrupted collocations in English such as “once again”, “give up”, or “gross national product” handled as a single word or a compound word in Japanese, can be automatically extracted with corresponding Japanese words using wor...