[Lexicog] Interesting lexical discoveries

[Patrick Hanks]

Apologies.  I seem to have posted a blank message.
Here's what I meant to send:

> I would think that introspection can be used in collocation research in
two
> ways: thinking up examples, and figuring out the relations among given
> examples.  As you say, the former is subject to omission.  But I suspect
> that the latter is downright necessary.

Yes, introspection is necessary to interpret data.  My point is that it
should
not be used to invent data.

> There's an interesting comment on page 185 of Manning and Schutze's
> Foundations of Statistical NLP:
>
>     It is instructive to look at the types of collocations
>     that a purely linguistic analysis of text will discover
>     if plenty of time and person power is available so
>     that the limitations of statistical analysis and computer
>     technology need be of no concern.
>
> They then show some collocation results from the BBI Combinatory
Dictionary
> of English, and further comment:
>
>     Naturally, the quality of the collocations is also
>     higher than computer-generated lists -- as we
>     would expect from a manually produced
>     compilation. [!]

Manning and Schuetze are great BUT  here they are off the wall, up the
creek,
in the pooh. This is nothing more than polite mouthing.  How do they judge
"quality" of collocations?  To the best of my knowledge and belief, BBI is
a pre-corpus dictionary. A serious comparison of BBI's (mainly
intuition-based)
collocations with corpus data would be a worthwhile project for someone.

> On pg. 187, they mention work by Church et al on "a program of
computational
> lexicography that combines corpus evidence, computational methods and
human
> judgement to build more comprehensive dictionaries that better reflect
> actual language use."

Speaking as one of the "al", I'd say that just about summarizes it
correctly.


Patrick








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