CollFrEn: rich bilingual English–French collocation resource

Abstract

Collocations in the sense of idiosyncratic lexical co-occurrences of two syntactically bound words traditionally pose a challenge to language learners and many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications alike. Reliable ground truth (i.e., ideally manually compiled) resources are thus of high value. We present a manually compiled bilingual English–French collocation resource with 7,480 collocations in English and 6,733 in French. Each collocation is enriched with information that facilitates its downstream exploitation in NLP tasks such as machine translation, word sense disambiguation, natural language generation, relation classification, and so forth. Our proposed enrichment covers: the semantic category of the collocation (its lexical function), its vector space representation (for each individual word as well as their joint collocation embedding), a subcategorization pattern of both its elements, as well as their corresponding BabelNet id, and finally, indices of their occurrences in large scale reference corpora.