Comparing Lexical Relationships Observed within Japanese Collocation Data and Japanese Word Association Norms

While large-scale corpora and various corpus query tools have long been recognized as essential language resources, the value of word association norms as language resources has been largely overlooked. This paper conducts some initial comparisons of the lexical relationships observed within Japanese collocation data extracted from a large corpus using the Japanese language version of the Sketch Engine (SkE) tool (Srdanovic et al., 2008) and the relationships found within Japanese word association sets taken from the large-scale Japanese Word Association Database (JWAD) under ongoing construction by Joyce (2005, 2007). The comparison results indicate that while some relationships are common to both linguistic resources, many lexical relationships are only observed in one resource. These findings suggest that both resources are necessary in order to more adequately cover the diverse range of lexical relationships. Finally, the paper reflects briefly on the implementation of association-based word-search strategies into electronic dictionaries proposed by Zock and Bilac (2004) and Zock (2006).

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