A Lexical Semantic and Statistical Approach to Lexical Collocation Extraction for Natural Language Generation

These collocations are used by native speakers of a language almost without thought, yet they must be learned by nonnative speakers of the language. A native speaker of English might say that he/she drinks "strong coffee," but a nonnative speaker might say either "powerful coffee" or "sturdy coffee." Collocations tend to vary among languages and topic domains. Unfortunately, the task of correctly identifying lexical collocations, even by native speakers of the language, has been shown to be difficult. Computer systems that translate natural languages, or machine-translation systems, need to know about lexical collocation information to produce natural-sounding or colloquially proper text.