Semantics-Driven Recognition of Collocations Using Word Embeddings

L2 learners often produce “ungrammatical” word combinations such as, e.g., *give a suggestion or *make a walk. This is because of the “collocationality” of one of their items (the base) that limits the acceptance of collocates to express a specific meaning (‘perform’ above). We propose an algorithm that delivers, for a given base and the intended meaning of a collocate, the actual collocate lexeme(s) (make / take above). The algorithm exploits the linear mapping between bases and collocates from examples and generates a collocation transformation matrix which is then applied to novel unseen cases. The evaluation shows a promising line of research in collocation discovery.

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