Bridging Collocational and Syntactic Analysis

The advent of the computer era, which enabled the development of large text corpora and of sophisticated corpus processing tools, led to unprecedented advances in the area of collocational analysis. These advances were paralleled by significant achievements in the area of syntactic analysis, with parsing technologies becoming available for an increasing number of languages. But more often than not, these developments have taken place independently. The coupling of collocational and syntactic analyses has seldom been considered, despite the fact that one type of analysis could benefit the other. In this chapter, we focus on the integration of syntactic parsing and collocational analysis. First, we review the literature describing syntactically-informed approaches to collocation extraction. Second, we survey the work devoted to exploiting collocational resources for syntactic parsing. Finally, we refer to more recent work that proposes a joint approach to collocational and syntactic analysis, arguing that the two analyses are interdependent to such a degree that only a simultaneous process, one in which structure decoding and pattern identification go hand in hand, can provide a solid bridge between them.