Retrieving domain-specific collocations by co-occurrences and word order constraints

In this paper, we describe a method for automatically retrieving collocations from large text corpora. This method comprises the following stages: (1) extracting strings of characters as units of collocations, and (2) extracting recurrent combinations of strings as collocations. Through this method, various types of domain-specific collocations can be retrieved simultaneously This method is practical because it uses plain text with no specific-language-dependent information, such as lexical knowledge and parts of speech. Experimental results using English and Japanese text corpora show that the method is equally applicable to both languages.