This book presents a comprehensive description of collocation, covering both the theoretical and practical background and the implications and applications of the concept as language model and analytical tool. It provides a definitive survey of currently available techniques and a detailed description of their implementation.

Definition is a basic activity of language, of particular importance to linguists because of its use of language to describe itself. Beyond this inherent significance as a crucial element of language study, definitions also provide a rich potential source of the information needed for Natural Language Processing systems. This book describes an investigation of the subset of general language used in definition sentences and the development of a taxonomy of definition types, a grammar of definition sentences and parsing software which can extract their functional components. The work is based on definition sentences used in one of the dictionaries from the Cobuild range, and the book includes a brief history of the development of monolingual English dictionaries, an assessment of the concepts of sublanguages and local grammars and a full exploration of the results of the analysis and of the present and future applications of the taxonomy, grammar and parser.

This book is a first-stop introduction to corpus-based language research. It takes the reader systematically through the practical problems and benefits including the points to be reviewed before using computers, obtaining corpus material, the main analytical tools and the most important applications of computerised natural language processing. Each chapter offers guidance on programming where appropriate at a level suitable for readers with no prior experience, and provides exercises to help the reader to apply the principles covered. Case studies are used to show how the techniques are used in genuine research situations. * Provides and introduction to computer analysis, techniques, the practical problems involved in using them and their potential benefits * The guidance on programming provides a basic tool kit for use and devleopment by readers with no previous experience. * The exercises at the end of each chapter allow readers to test their understanding and to develop an effective approach to their own research problems. * The case studies demonstrate the use of the techniques described in real research situations.