The aim of this book is try to illustrate with numerous examples how quantitative methods can most fruitfully contribute to linguistic analysis and research. In addition, it does not intend to offer an exhaustive presentation of all statistical techniques available to linguistics, but to demonstrate the contribution that statistics can and should make to linguistic studies. This book shows how quantitative methods and statistical techniques can supplement qualitative analyses of language. It attempts to present some mathematical and statistical properties of natural languages, and introduces some of the quantitative methods which are of the most value in working empirically with texts and corpora, illustrating the various issues with numerous examples and moving from the most basic descriptive techniques to decision-taking techniques and to more sophisticated multivariate statistical language models.

This book re-examines the notion of word associations, more precisely collocations. It attempts to come to a potentially more generally applicable definition of collocation and how to best extract, identify and measure collocations. The book highlights the role played by (i) automatic linguistic annotation (part-of-speech tagging, syntactic parsing, etc.), (ii) using semantic criteria to facilitate the identification of collocations, (iii) multi-word structured, instead of the widespread assumption of bipartite collocational structures, for capturing the intricacies of the phenomenon of syntagmatic attraction, (iv) considering collocation and valency as near neighbours in the lexis-grammar continuum and (v) the mathematical properties of statistical association measures in the automatic extraction of collocations from corpora. This book is an ideal guide to the use of statistics in collocation analysis and lexicography, as well as a practical text to the development of skills in the application of computational lexicography. Lexical Collocation Analysis: Advances and Applications begins with a proposal for integrating both collocational and valency phenomena within the overarching theoretical framework of construction grammar. Next the book makes the case for integrating advances in syntactic parsing and in collocational analysis. Chapter 3 offers an innovative look at complementing corpus data and dictionaries in the identification of specific types of collocations consisting of restricted predicate-argument combinations. This strategy complements corpus collocational data with network analysis techniques applied to dictionary entries. Chapter 4 explains the potential of collocational graphs and networks both as a visualization tool and as an analytical technique. Chapter 5 introduces MERGE (Multi-word Expressions from the Recursive Grouping of Elements), a data-driven approach to the identification and extraction of multi-word expressions from corpora. Finally the book concludes with an analysis and evaluation of factors influencing the performance of collocation extraction methods in parsed corpora.

The aim of this book is try to illustrate with numerous examples how quantitative methods can most fruitfully contribute to linguistic analysis and research. In addition, it does not intend to offer an exhaustive presentation of all statistical techniques available to linguistics, but to demonstrate the contribution that statistics can and should make to linguistic studies. This book shows how quantitative methods and statistical techniques can supplement qualitative analyses of language. It attempts to present some mathematical and statistical properties of natural languages, and introduces some of the quantitative methods which are of the most value in working empirically with texts and corpora, illustrating the various issues with numerous examples and moving from the most basic descriptive techniques to decision-taking techniques and to more sophisticated multivariate statistical language models.

The first edited collection dedicated exclusively to Spanish corpus linguistics 36 chapters, from the leading experts in the field, address the topics from several different angles and perspectives Written entirley in Spanish making it an ideal reference for instructors, students and researchers in Spanish linguistics.