Collocation Dictionary Research Articles

Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English

Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English

Collocation Dictionary Optimization Using WordNetand k -Nearest Neighbor Learning

In machine translation, collocation dictionaries are important for selecting accurate target words. However, if the dictionary size is too large it can decrease the efficiency of translation. This paper presents a method to develop a compact collocation dictionary for transitive verb–object pairs in English–Korean machine translation without losing translation accuracy. We use WordNet to calculate the semantic distance between words, and k-nearest neighbor learning to select the translations. The entries in the dictionary are minimized to balance the trade-off between translation accuracy and time. We have performed several experiments on a selected set of verbs extracted from a raw corpus of over 3 million words. The results show that in real-time translation environments the size of a collocation dictionary can be reduced up to 40% of its original size without significant decrease in its accuracy.

English Dictionaries for Foreign Learners: A History (review)

Reviews205 English Dictionariesfor Foreign Learners: A History. 1999. A. P. Cowie. Oxford : Clarendon Press. Pp. xiii + 232. $72.00 A;. P. Cowie's overview of the genesis and development of dictioncaries specially written for non-native speakers of English is meticulously researched, his commentary supported with a wealth of detail in the best scholarly tradition — that is, as far as the commentary goes. Mr. Cowie declares in his introduction that his study is limited to a focus on the development of the advanced-level dictionary, and also that he has "deliberately stopped short" of discussing any advanced learner's dictionary published in the 1990s. He offers as a reason his own need to remain detached from the discussion , a decision that I found puzzling and regrettable. That a scholar as respected as Mr. Cowie should choose to gloss over a decade in which the impact of corpus lexicography became fully evident in dictionaries produced with the aid of corpora calls into question the ultimate usefulness of this book as a complete history of the subject. The History, then, is in fact a description of the development of advanced -level learner dictionaries from their inception to 1989. Intermediate, beginner, and picture dictionaries are not covered, nor are the "production" dictionaries of the 1990s, not even in the final section that focuses on the dictionary user, where such a discussion would have been of great interest. Rather than in breadth, then, the strength of the History lies in its detail: in Mr. Cowie's descriptions of the scope of the task facing the earliest pioneers, and in his painstaking comparisons of the ways various early works treat the myriad elements that make up a learner's dictionary. There are six chapters in the History: "The Genesis of the Learner's Dictionary," "Phraseology and the Learner's Dictionary ," "The Second Generation of Learners' Dictionaries," "The Role of the Computer in Learner Lexicography," "The Third Generation of Learners' Dictionaries ," and "Focus on die Dictionary User." The longest chapter is the first, in which the pioneering work of Harold Palmer, Michael West, and A. S. Hornby in the early years of the 20th century is discussed in great detail. Mr. Cowie traces the beginnings of the vocabulary control movement that led to A General Service List ofEnglish Words (1953), a model of a basic vocabulary originally developed by Michael West in the 1930s and based on students ' needs, rather than culled from native-speaker dictionaries. Nearly all of the elements that are now familiar to learner lexicography can be traced to die work of Palmer, West, and Hornby: the listing of homographs separately, the defining of derivative forms, a pedagogical approach to grammar, the attention to issues of collocation and idiomaticity, as well as to characteristics of the spoken language. In illustrating the issues that these men were confronting, Mr. Cowie summarizes a point from West's report, Definition Vocabulary (1935): West put his finger unerringly on the characteristic weaknesses of definitions in the mother-tongue dictionary — the fondness Dictionaries:Journal ofthe Dictionary Society ofNorth America 22 (2001) 206Reviews for defining the known (say, penal) in terms of the unknown ('instrument'? 'tapering'?), and the tendency to fall back on 'scatter-gun' techniques, whereby 'one fires off a number of near or approximate synonyms in the hope that one or other will hit the mark and be understood', as in: 'sinuate = tortuous , wavy, winding'. (24) The second chapter treats die questions of what constitutes a phrase, and how and where phrases should be shown in a dictionary. Here again we find the origin of a now-common convention, that of using bold type to indicate relative fixity of a phrase (Palmer's innovation) . Various categories of phrases are discussed; Mr. Cowie provides a table showing a scale of idiomaticity: Free combinationopen a window; a green wall Restricted collocationmeet the demand; easy money Figurative idiomcall the shots; a sacred cow Pure idiomspill the beans; a dead duck He then asserts that "the precision with which these various distinctions were captured in dictionaries of idioms and collocations compiled in the 1970s and 1980s would be an important measure of their quality" (71) . This assertion in fact points to...

A Russian-English collocational dictionary of the human body by Lidua Iordanskaya and Slava Paperno (review)

A Russian-English collocational dictionary of the human body by Lidua Iordanskaya and Slava Paperno (review)

Language in cognitive development: The emergence of the mediated mind by Katherine Nelson (review)

684 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 3 (1998) A Russian-English collocational dictionary of the human body. By Lidua Iordanskaya and Slava Paperno; English equivalents by Lesli LaRocco and Jean Mackenzie; ed. by Richard L. Leed. Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers , 1996. Pp. xxvii. 418. This dictionary contains 73 entries in 418 pages. The aim 'is to present all the information necessary for the correct use of the ... Russian words and expressions' (v). While the primary audience is people learning Russian, it should also be of interest to researchers in Russian and to lexicographers. Sixty-five headwords refer to body parts, including external body parts (e.g. 6edpo 'hip', auuji 'face'', pyica 'arm, hand'), external phenomena (e.g. ôopoda 'beard', eoAOCbt 'hair'), bones (KAK>Huu,a 'clavicle', AonamKa 'shoulder blade'), and organs (cepdufi 'heart', oxenydoK 'stomach'). Three describe emissions (¡cpoeb 'blood', nom 'sweat', cne3a 'tear' ), three describe 'emissions of emotional states' (cMex 'laughter', yAbtÔKa 'smile', xoxom 'loud laughter') and two describe the voice (zoaoc 'speaking voice', zoaoc 'singing voice'). Each entry begins with the headword, translation equivalents, and examples followed by comments on 'Style' when not neutral (e.g. colloquial, rude, technical ). Next come 'Semantics', 'Morphology', and 'Syntax' sections. 'Semantics' presents a basic definition , uses of the word with animals, and related meanings (including metaphorical meanings). 'Morphology ' includes morphophonemic and morphological information. 'Syntax' includes information on use with possessors and restrictive modifiers. These are followed by 'Lexical relationships' and finally by 'Sample texts' . 'Lexical relationships' is the core of each entry. This section begins with related forms including synonyms , diminutives, augmentatives, syntactic derivatives (usually adjectival forms), hypernyms (parts of x), and hyponyms (what ? is a part of). These are followed by collocations listed under general headings like 'appearance, conditions and sensations', and 'movements'. Individual collocations frequently include comments or examples. A preface and foreword provide a good introduction to the dictionary as well as to general problems faced by lexicographers and how many can be resolved by collocational information. The dictionary is ofparticular use to those learning Russian. Itindicates, for example, that axydoe nuup is a 'thin face' while xydbie ôedpo are 'bony hips'; a 'bony face' is KocmnHeoe Auup. A ?µa,? can also be moAcmoe 'fat', MÏÏcucmoe 'fleshy' or nyxAoe 'plump'. For lexicographers, the dictionary shows how collocational information can help differentiate synonyms . For example, while 6K)cm 'breast' refers specifically to outward appearance, zpydb 'breast' has a more general meaning as shown by the collocation KopMumb zpydbR) 'to breastfeed' (*Kopjnumb 6K)cmoM). This emphasis on collocations explains the decision to differentiate headwords like naneu,1 'finger' and naneu} 'toe': they exhibit different collocational relationships. It probably also explains the inclusion of technical words like Kucmb 'hand' which is synonymous with the more common pyica 'arm, hand' but is used in far fewer collocations. My criticisms are minor. Examples of different types of restrictive modifiers (relative clauses, participles , adjectives) in 'Syntax' are apparently random. Some of the choices of headwords seem idiosyncratic . Forexample, muKonomrca 'ankle' is included while the more common nodbiXKa 'ankle' is not. The headwordnodotuea 'sole' is a synonym ofcmynniP ·, not cmynnH^. Some of die text in the foreword (xix) has been omitted. These problems, however, should not detract from its value to students of Russian and to lexicographers. [John M. Clifton, University ofNorth Dakota/Summer Institute ofLinguistics .] Language in cognitive development: The emergence of the mediated mind. By Katherine Nelson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp xiv, 432. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95. Nelson's central argument is that as the young child leams to master the full range of representational and communicative uses of language, she progresses through different stages of cognitive development. N's theoretical approach to cognitive development is experiential. Within this approach, the child is viewed as an 'acting and interacting person ' (4) who derives knowledge 'from action in the world, from perception, from biological dispositions to organize patterns of experience in specific ways, from social interactions and activities, and from cultural arrangements' (6). Based on findings from her own research and that of others, N shows that cognitive development is crucially dependent on the acquisition of specific linguistic categories and concepts, and speech genres. According to N, children begin constructing...

An Arabic-English collocational dictionary

Les efforts que consacre actuellement l'auteur de cet article à la confection d'un dictionnaire de collocation bilingue arabe-anglais se heurtent à de nombreux obstacles théoriques et méthodologiques. Au niveau théorique, l'auteur se voit contraint de fournir une définition de travail pour la collocation mais aussi une analyse raisonnée du procédé de compilation. Au niveau méthodologique, il s'agit d'établir comment seront organisées les entrées lexicologiques et quelles seront leur nature et leur nombre. Et puisque ce type de dictionnaire est assez récent, l'auteur ne peut qu'espérer que la recherche effectuée dans ce domaine particulier de la lexicologie permettra de mieux comprendre et d'encourager de nouvelles recherches en vue d'améliorer la contribution du phénomène de collocation à l'enseignement de la traduction.

The Method of Access of "COLS", Version II.

A new version of the method of access to ‘COLS’, a dictionary of English Collocations in physical science, is illustrated.The access method becomes much simpler than before, by virtue of making use of a data on collocations rearranged for the specific purpose, rather than the originally compiled LISP data.

On "COLS", a Dictionary of English Collocations in Physical Science.

An introduction is given on “COLS”, a dictionary of English ‘collocations’ which are commonly used in physical science, especially in plasma physics and in the field of fusion research. The dictionary is stored in the memory of the computer in the Computer Center of NIFS, and is easily accessible to any TSS user of the computer. Explanations are given on the main charateristics of the dictionary and the method of access to it.

A Collocational Dictionary of Russian

Advanced learners of Russian, like learners of any language, need a collocational dictionary that will help them encode (i.e., generate) grammatically correct sentences. While collocational dictionaries of Russian do exist, they are woefully inadequate. The purpose of this paper is to describe an adequate collocational dictionary for learners of Russian. Such a collocational dictionary would be not only an invaluable aid to the student and teacher, but also a significant contribution to the linguistic description of Russian. We will briefly review what has been done, make specific recommendations about what should and should not be included in a collocational dictionary, and then discuss under which headwords collocations should be entered in

A Collocational Dictionary of Common Chinese Verbs (with English Explanations). By Wang Yannong and Jiao Pangyong. [Heidelberg: Julius Groos Verlag, 1985. 588 pp. DM58.00.

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