Gravity Counts for the boundaries of collocations

Abstract

This paper compares several methods (MI,T-score, Dice) for the extraction of collocations and presents a new method called Gravity Counts. The respective methods are evaluated and compared, measuring the combinability and collocability for each pair of words within the moving span of three words in the corpus of “The Times” newspaper for the year 1995. The collocability of words is the basis for detection of the collocational chains, i.e. frequent recurrent uninterrupted strings of word-forms, with clear-cut boundaries, found in the corpus. Collocational chains obtained with the help of different methods are compared and their lexical, grammatical and semantic features discussed.