supporting collocation learning shaoqun wu university of waikato

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