Semantics-driven recognition of collocations using word embeddings

L2 learners often produce “ungrammatical” word combinations such as, e.g., *give a suggestion or *make a walk. This is because of the “collocationality” of one of their items (the base) that limits the acceptance of collocates to express a specific meaning (‘perform’ above). We propose an algorithm that delivers, for a given base and the intended meaning of a collocate, the actual collocate lexeme(s) (make / take above). The algorithm exploits the/nlinear mapping between bases and collocates from examples and generates a collocation transformation matrix which is then applied to novel unseen cases. The evaluation shows a promising line of research in collocation discovery. The present work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness/n(MINECO), through a predoctoral grant (BES-2012-057036) in the framework of the project HARenES (FFI2011-30219-C02-02), and by the European Commission under the grant number H2020–645012–RIA. We also acknowledge support from the Maria de Maeztu Excellence Program (MDM-2015-0502).