Automatic Extraction of English Collocations and their Chinese-English Bilingual Examples: A Computational Tool for Bilingual Lexicography

Abstract

This paper describes the procedures involved in developing EXEC, a web-based system which can automatically extract English collocations and their Chinese-English bilingual examples from parallel corpora. The system draws on statistics, dependency parsing, and Chinese-English parallel corpora of more than 13 million English words and 27 million Chinese characters. By taking a word as well as the parts-of-speech of the word and its collocate as input, the system can automatically generate collocation candidates based on syntactic dependency relations as well as statistical information regarding mutual information, t-scores, and log likelihood ratios. In conjunction with a Chinese-English bilingual concordancer, it can further extract English sentences containing identified collocations along with their Chinese translations. Our evaluations suggest that the proposed system performs reasonably well in terms of accuracy and efficiency. EXEC can be used in facilitating automatic compilation of bilingual collocation dictionaries as well as in overcoming the L2 language barrier for Chinese learners of English.