Using Simple Computational Linguistic Techniques for Teaching Collocations
Tomonori Nagano, Kenji Kitao · Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · 2007
This article examines possible applications of collocation extraction techniques to second/foreign language (especially, English) instruction. We will employ four simple collocation extraction measures – t-statistic, chi-square, Mutual Information, and log likelihood – and demonstrate how those collocation measures help language teachers identify important collocations in authentic L2 reading. We will also examine several typical collocation-related mistakes by Japanese-speaking English language learners. We suggest that some collocation errors can be explained by the influence of learners' native language. With this background in mind, we developed two pilot programs (automatic collocation exercise generation and automatic collocation error detection) using the aforementioned four collocation measures.