Semantics-Driven Collocation Discovery

Resumen

Collocations are combinations of two lexically dependent elements, of which one (the base) is freely chosen because of its meaning, and the choice of the other (the collocate) depends on the base. Collocations are difficult to master by language learners. This difficulty becomes evident in that even when learners know the meaning they want to express, they often struggle to choose the right collocate. Collocation dictionaries, in which collocates are grouped into semantic categories, are useful tools. However, they are scarce since they are the result of costintensive manual elaboration. In this paper, we present for Spanish an algorithm that automatically retrieves for a given base and a given semantic category the corresponding collocates.