Abstract
The advent of the computer era, which enabled the development of large text corpora and of sophisticated corpus processing tools, led to unprecedented advances in the area of collocational analysis. These advances were paralleled by significant achievements in the area of syntactic analysis, with parsing technologies becoming available for an increasing number of languages. But more often than not, these developments have taken place independently. The coupling of collocational and syntactic analyses has seldom been considered, despite the fact that one type of analysis could benefit the other. In this chapter, we focus on the integration of syntactic parsing and collocational analysis. First, we review the literature describing syntactically-informed approaches to collocation extraction. Second, we survey the work devoted to exploiting collocational resources for syntactic parsing. Finally, we refer to more recent work that proposes a joint approach to collocational and syntactic analysis, arguing that the two analyses are interdependent to such a degree that only a simultaneous process, one in which structure decoding and pattern identification go hand in hand, can provide a solid bridge between them.
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Notes
- 1.
The same metaphor is used by Uhrig and Proisl (2012).
- 2.
Although there is no generally accepted list of collocation patterns (as it is widely accepted that the parameters of a collocation extraction procedure may vary according to the intended use of results), most authors agree that typical collocation patterns include the ones enumerated in Hausmann’s definition (1989, 1010) – ‘We shall call collocation a characteristic combination of two words in a structure like the following: (a) noun + adjective (epithet); (b) noun + verb; (c) verb + noun (object); (d) verb + adverb; (e) adjective + adverb; (f) noun + (prep) + noun’.
- 3.
This decision is also motivated by statistical considerations, as most statistical methods are unreliable for low-frequency data. However, it is contested by the lexicographic community, because a significant part of lexicographically interesting candidates occurs only once or twice in a corpus (Piao et al., 2005, 379).
- 4.
https://github.com/seretan/collocation-extraction-toy (accessed 1 February 2018).
- 5.
A French verb, for instance, may have as many as 48 forms (Tzoukermann and Radev, 1996).
- 6.
The same approach has been used by Uhrig and Proisl (2012), among others.
- 7.
The extraction system was named FipsCo, as it relies on the output of the Fips parser (Laenzlinger and Wehrli, 1991; Wehrli, 1997; Wehrli and Nerima, 2015). It is available online at http://latlapps.unige.ch (accessed 1 February 2018).
- 8.
PARSEME (2013–2017) was a European COST Action focusing on the link between complex lexical items and a comprehensive linguistic analysis of text. With more than 200 members from 33 countries, the Action fostered research on the integration of complex lexical items in parsing and translation.
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I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers, whose comments and suggestions allowed me to improve the chapter.
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Seretan, V. (2018). Bridging Collocational and Syntactic Analysis. In: Cantos-Gómez, P., Almela-Sánchez, M. (eds) Lexical Collocation Analysis. Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92582-0_2
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