Browsing by Subject "Collocation"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3

Open Access
Document ranking by graph based lexical cohesion and term proximity computation
(2008) Gürkök, Hayrettin
During the course of reading, the meaning of each word is processed in the context of the meaning of the preceding words in text. Traditional IR systems usually adopt index terms to index and retrieve documents. Unfortunately, a lot of the semantics in a document or query is lost when the text is replaced with just a set of words (bag-of-words). This makes it mandatory to adapt linguistic theories and incorporate language processing techniques into IR tasks. The occurrences of index terms in a document are motivated. Frequently, in a document, the appearance of one word attracts the appearance of another. This can occur in forms of short-distance relationships (proximity) like common noun phrases as well as long-distance relationships (transitivity) defined as lexical cohesion in text. Much of the work done on determining context is based on estimating either long-distance or short-distance word relationships in a document. This work proposes a graph representation for documents and a new matching function based on this representation. By the use of graphs, it is possible to capture both short- and long-distance relationships in a single entity to calculate an overall context score. Experiments made on three TREC document collections showed significant performance improvements over the benchmark, Okapi BM25, retrieval model. Additionally, linguistic implications about the nature and trend of cohesion between query terms were achieved.
Open Access
Formulaicity in an agglutinating language: the case of Turkish
(De Gruyter Mouton, 2013) Durrant, P.
This study examines the extent to which complex inflectional patterns found in Turkish, a language with a rich agglutinating morphology, can be described as formulaic. It is found that many prototypically formulaic phenomena previously attested at the multi-word level in English - frequent co-occurrence of specific elements, fixed 'bundles' of elements, and associations between lexis and grammar - also play an important role at the morphological level in Turkish. It is argued that current psycholinguistic models of agglutinative morphology need to be complexified to incorporate such patterns. Conclusions are also drawn for the practice of Turkish as a Foreign Language teaching and for the methodology of Turkish corpus linguistics.
Open Access
Major sources of collocational errors made by EFL learners at Koya University
(2010) Hama, Hawraz Q.
The aim of the present study was to explore the main sources of collocational errors made by learners of English as Foreign Language (EFL). To address this issue, 40 Kurdish seniors studying EFL at Koya University’s College of Languages located in Northern Iraq participated in this study. Quantitative data were obtained from the collocation completion test used to explore the main sources of collocational errors made by the participants. Qualitative data were obtained from think-aloud protocols aimed to find out possible main source(s) of collocational errors. The results showed that the participants’ collocational errors resulted from two major sources, namely, low frequency of collocations and the influence of L1. Factors such as the frequency of collocation components and Mutual Information (MI) were found to be ineffective in the production of correct collocations because these factors did not cause errors in collocations. Finally, implications of these results for teaching are discussed. Additionally, suggestions were made for ways in which researchers and materials designers could provide better language teaching materials with respect to collocations taking into account major factors that often cause difficulty in collocations.