Defining collocation for Slovenian lexical resources

Abstract

In this paper, we define the notion of collocation for the purpose of its use in machine-readable language resources, which will be used in the creation of electronic dictionaries and language applications for Slovene. Based on theoretical and lexicographically-driven studies we define collocation as a lexical phenomenon, defined by three key aspects: statistical, syntactic, and semantic. We take lexicographic relevance as a point of departure for defining collocations within the typology of word combinations, as well as for distinguishing them from free combinations. Free combinations are (frequent) syntactically valid word combinations without lexicographic value and consequently there is no need for the description of their meaning, or syntactic role. Next, we distinguish collocations from all multiword lexical units (compounds, phraseological units and lexico-grammatical units) using the lexicographic view that multiword lexical units, whose meaning is not a sum of its parts, require a description of their meaning whereas collocations do not. In the final part, we return to the three aspects of collocation and their role in automatic extraction of collocational information from corpora. Semantic criterion or dictionary relevance of extracted collocations has particularly exposed the problem of semantically broad collocates such as certain types of adverbs, adjectives and verbs, and word which feature in different syntactic roles (e.g. pronouns and adjuncts). We discuss a particular issue of collocations related to proper names and the decisions about their inclusion into the dictionary based on the evaluation of lexicographers.

Keywords

• collocation
• multiword lexical unit
• word combination
• Slovene
• lexicography
• dictionary database