Combining Grammatical and Relational Approaches. A Hybrid Method for the Identification of Candidate Collocations from Corpora

We present an evaluation of three different methods for the automatic identification of candidate collocations in corpora, part of a research project focused on the development of a learner dictionary of Italian collocations. We compare the commonly used POS-based method and the syntactic dependency-based method with a hybrid method integrating both approaches. We conduct a statistical analysis on a sample corpus of written and spoken texts of different registers. Results show that the hybrid method can correctly detect more candidate collocations against a human annotated benchmark. The scores are particularly high in adjectival modifier relations. A hybrid approach to candidate collocation identification seems to lead to an improvement in the quality of results.