On the computation of collostruction strength: Testing measures of association as expressions of lexical bias
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Daniel Wiechmann
Abstract
Collostruction strength, i.e. the degree of attraction that a word Cj exhibits to a construction Ck, has been argued to be exploited in processes of online comprehension, for example, to parse ambiguous structures. There are, however, many ways to express this quantity and a large body of candidate measures can be found in the computational and corpus linguistic literature. The present study provides a comprehensive empirical evaluation of 47 competing (variants of) measures of association in order to assess their usefulness for models of sentence comprehension. To that end, the degree of adequacy of a given measure is evaluated against its performance in a task of predicting human behavior in an eye-tracking experiment that investigated the reading of a local syntactic complementation ambiguity (Kennison 2001). The analysis shows that individual measures in fact arrive at different estimations of degrees of attraction between verbs and the relevant complementation patterns, and hence differ in their power to predict human reading behavior. On the basis of the obtained results, it is suggested that minimum sensitivity (Pedersen and Bruce 1996) is best suited as an expression of collostruction strength.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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- Cross-linguistic comparisons of the market metaphors
- Testing search engine frequencies: Patterns of inconsistency
- Discourse and metaphor: A corpus-driven inquiry
- Agile corpus creation
- On the computation of collostruction strength: Testing measures of association as expressions of lexical bias
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- Contents Volume 4 (2008)
Articles in the same Issue
- Semantic preference and semantic prosody re-examined
- Cross-linguistic comparisons of the market metaphors
- Testing search engine frequencies: Patterns of inconsistency
- Discourse and metaphor: A corpus-driven inquiry
- Agile corpus creation
- On the computation of collostruction strength: Testing measures of association as expressions of lexical bias
- NTU corpus of Formosan languages: A state-of-the-art report
- Contents Volume 4 (2008)
