Supporting Collocation Learning
Shaoqun Wu
University of Waikato
strong smoker
powerful tea
big rain
look book
one sex product
heavy smoker
strong smoker
heavy rain
read a book
disposable product
What is collocation?
Choice of one word conditions the choice of the next, and of the next again
John McHardy Sinclair
incite the soldiers to fight bravely
The most important reason which caused these changes was the development of economy in developing countries.
Semantic Prosody(connotation)
Many uses of words and phrases show a tendency to occur in a certain semantic environment
John McHardy Sinclair
outcome, consequence and aftermath
horse horse tiger tiger
people mountain people sea
Existing collocation resources
What are you doing tonight ?
I am going to look TV.
Watch TV?
Z Z Z
Collocation databases
• Web Phrases
• Web collocations
• British National Corpus, British Academic Written Text and Wikipedia
http://flax.nzdl.org
Building collocation databases
Google n-gram collection
word_1 <space> word_2 <space>… word_n <tab> count
tokens 1,024,908,267,229 1012
sentences 95,119,665,584 0.95109
unigrams 13,588,391 0.014109
bi-grams 314,843,401 0.3109
trigrams 977,069,902 1.0109
four-grams 1,313,818,354 1.3109
five-grams 1,176,470,663 1.2109
language knowledge is collocation
Language knowledge is collocation knowledge
1211
Language knowledge is collocation knowledge
language knowledge knowledge is is collocation collocation knowledge
1111
language knowledge is 1knowledge is collocation 1is collocation knowledge 1
Language knowledge is collocation knowledge
Language knowledge is collocation knowledge
language knowledge is collocation knowledge is collocation knowledge
11
Language knowledge is collocation knowledge
Language knowledge is collocation knowledge 1
Natural Language Porcessing
OpenNLP toolkits
How are you? I’m fine.
cut: noun or verb?
Grow your own cut flowers.
How to cut flowers to last longer?
cut flowers
cut: noun or verb?
cut flowers and ornamental foliage
cut flowers
Language knowledge is collocation knowledge
Language/NN knowledge/NN is/VBZ collocation/NN knowledge/NN
Extracting noun + noun phrases
Language/NN knowledge/NN is/VBZ collocation/NN knowledge/NN
Language/NN knowledge/NN collocation/NN knowledge/NN
Extracting noun + noun phrases
Parents have a wide range of options to cultivate their children with a good art understanding
cultivate their children
It will health problem
bring the heath problem.
Dear JaneYou are very very very beautiful. I love you very much.
Joe