Does anybody know of source (probably NLP study) of comprehensive list of collocations in English (not only the frequent one). Additionally, does anybody know the approximate estimate of the total number of collocations.
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1I'm one of a number of people on this list who are not experts. Could you please expand your answer, starting with an explanation of what a "collocation" is in this context.– James GrossmannAug 15, 2013 at 7:40
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1This was cross-posted on English Language & Usage.– HugoAug 15, 2013 at 10:47
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Those who want to follow this question might want to check out the Wikipedia article on collocations here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collocation. // Also, for Ross's benefit, there is a dictionary of English collocations available for purchase. Check out this page: macmillandictionaries.com/features/how-dictionaries-are-written/…– James GrossmannAug 15, 2013 at 22:31
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I am aware of and have worked extensively with five English collocations dictionaries (Longman collocations.longmandictionariesonline.com, OUP, Macmillan, BBI benjamins.com/#catalog/books/z.bbi/main, and LTP). Not sure if this is what you're looking for. You could make your own list, too.– Alex B.Aug 16, 2013 at 1:33
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Also, take a look at collocates.info– Alex B.Aug 20, 2013 at 3:34
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2 Answers
A great place to start is http://www.collocates.info which is based on COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English). It is incredibly comprehensive (not free but the prices range from $45-$250).
This site also answers the question as to how many collocates there are in English? 4.3 million. That is from the perspective of all possible collocate relationships (even incredibly weak ones). You can only ask that question meaningfully if you have a purpose in mind. For instance, collocates to help students learn. Collocates that should trigger text autocomplete. Etc.
If you're looking for collocations for students, then you can start with the Oxford Collocations Dictionary which lists 250k collocations.
Or you can use the free online collocations dictionary. But you can only search that, not browse the whole list.
For NLP purposes, your best source is COCA or the already mentioned Google Ngrams (which has many limitations, also mentioned).
You can download Google Ngrams whole dataset.
http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2.html
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Unfortunately, n-grams are not collocations, but collocations are n-grams.– RossAug 17, 2013 at 7:54
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I don't know what you mean. Isn't there some way to extract the information you want out of the n-gram dataset?– MossAug 17, 2013 at 16:56
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Collocations are subset of n-grams. I already work with Google Ngrams. That is why I am looking for NLP study that already have extracted collocations.– RossAug 17, 2013 at 20:23