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I. KOSEM, S. KREK, P. GANTAR: Defining collocation for Slovenian lexical resources
DEFINING COLLOCATION FOR SLOVENIAN 
LEXICAL RESOURCES
I z t o k  K O S E M
Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana; Jožef Stefan Institute
S i m o n  K R E K
Jožef Stefan Institute
P o l o n a  G A N T A R
Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana
Kosem, I., Krek, S., Gantar, P. (2020): Defining collocation for Slovenian lexical resources. 
Slovenščina 2.0, 8(2): 1–27. 
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4312/slo2.0.2020.2.1-27
In this paper, we define the notion of collocation for the purpose of its use 
in machine-readable language resources, which will be used in the creation 
of electronic dictionaries and language applications for Slovene. Based on 
theoretical and lexicographically-driven studies we define collocation as a 
lexical phenomenon, defined by three key aspects: statistical, syntactic, and 
semantic. We take lexicographic relevance as a point of departure for defin-
ing collocations within the typology of word combinations, as well as for dis-
tinguishing them from free combinations. Free combinations are (frequent) 
syntactically valid word combinations without lexicographic value and con-
sequently there is no need for the description of their meaning, or syntactic 
role. Next, we distinguish collocations from all multiword lexical units (com-
pounds, phraseological units and lexico-grammatical units) using the lexico-
graphic view that multiword lexical units, whose meaning is not a sum of its 
parts, require a description of their meaning whereas collocations do not. In 
the final part, we return to the three aspects of collocation and their role in au-
tomatic extraction of collocational information from corpora. Semantic crite-
rion or dictionary relevance of extracted collocations has particularly exposed 
the problem of semantically broad collocates such as certain types of adverbs, 
adjectives and verbs, and word which feature in different syntactic roles (e.g. 
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pronouns and adjuncts). We discuss a particular issue of collocations related 
to proper names and the decisions about their inclusion into the dictionary 
based on the evaluation of lexicographers.
Keywords: collocation, multiword lexical unit, word combination, Slovene, lexico-
graphy, dictionary database
1  I N T R O D U C T I O N
The inclusion of collocations in machine-readable language resources, which 
are used in the creation of electronic dictionaries and language applications, 
requires a detailed, yet general enough, definition of the notion of collocation. 
It is important that such a definition can be applied in the development of 
language technologies as well as in language description, in our case in the 
compilation of Dictionary of Modern Slovene (Gorjanc et al., 2017). Majority 
of studies that describe collocation as a lexically relevant phenomenon men-
tion three key aspects: (i) statistical, which defines collocation as a statistically 
significant combination of two or more words, (ii) syntactic, which expects 
certain syntactic relations between words, and (iii) semantic, which presup-
poses that a collocation has a specific communication role. The latter aspect 
has made collocations since their “beginnings” (Firth, 1957; Altenberg, 1991; 
Sinclair, 1991) a lexical phenomenon that is lexicographically relevant and es-
pecially important for non-native speakers of a language (Palmer, 1933).
Considering these established notions of collocations, our paper has two aims. 
Firstly, we want to identify characteristics that define collocations as lexically 
relevant units. By this we mean that collocations are observed as an important 
part of lexis and worth including into language resources, intended for the 
creation of dictionaries, language tools and further computer processing (Kle-
menc et al., 2017). Secondly, we want to define collocations within all types of 
word combinations, especially in terms of their syntactic and semantic char-
acteristics, which is important when considering their “place” in the diction-
ary database as well as their description aimed at human users.
The paper is structured as follows. First, the basic notions that describe col-
location as a lexically relevant phenomenon are presented. Considering that 
collocation is a combination of at least two words, it means that we need to 
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I. KOSEM, S. KREK, P. GANTAR: Defining collocation for Slovenian lexical resources
consider its relation to all types of word combinations, taking into account the 
specifics of lexicographic workflow and automatic data extraction from corpo-
ra. In Section 3, we describe a typology developed in the compilation of Slo-
vene Lexical Database (Gantar, 2015), which distinguishes between different 
types of lexicographically relevant multiword units. Next, we present param-
eters for automatic extraction of collocation candidates from the corpus, and 
discuss problematic points discovered during the evaluation. Automatically 
extracted collocation candidates that were deemed as bad or not relevant are 
divided into four groups according to their nature: problems in corpus anno-
tation, problems related to statistical criteria, problems related to syntactic 
criteria, and problems related to semantic criteria (or dictionary relevance). 
We conclude the paper by discussing steps for improving automatic extraction 
of collocations from corpora, and offering some solutions for the presentation 
of collocations as dictionary units.
2 C O L L O C A T I O N A S A L E X I C A L P H E N O M E N O N
In the study of collocations, the approaches differ depending on how general 
or narrow the definition of collocation intends to be, and on the purpose of the 
definition, for example when including collocations in a dictionary. Although 
different approaches according to their purpose (different types of dictionar-
ies, language learning, natural language processing etc.), focus on different 
characteristics of collocations, their definitions of collocation revolve around 
three criteria: statistical, syntactic and semantic. 
2.1 Statistical criterion 
One of the key characteristics when defining collocation is its statistical value, 
which must be higher than random, or as Atkins and Rundell (2008, p. 302) 
state, collocation is “a recurrent combination of words, where one specific lexical 
item (the ‘node’) has observable tendency to occur with another (the collocate) 
with a frequency higher than chance”. A great body of research exists on meas-
uring collocation strength or collocativity (e.g., Berry-Rogghe, 1973; Church 
and Hanks, 1990; Church et al., 1991; Biber, 1993; Manning and Schütze, 1999; 
Evert, 2004; Gries, 2013). There are different statistical methods, i.e. associa-
tion measures, used. Association measures are regularly being compared, and 
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new ones proposed. Two good overviews of association measures are Wiech-
mann (2008) who compares 47 different association measures, and Pecina 
(2009) who conducts a comparison of more than 80 measures for collocation 
extraction. The general observations of the majority of such overview studies 
are aptly summarized by Evert (2009), namely that “different association meas-
ures will produce entirely different rankings of the collocates” (ibid., p. 1218) 
and “there is no ideal association measure for all purposes” (ibid., p. 1236).
As will be shown in the next sections, testing of automatic extraction of col-
locations for dictionary-making purposes has shown that the statistical cri-
terion needs to be combined with semantic and syntactic characteristics of 
collocations. This is evidenced by findings such as that statistically relevant 
collocations are usually syntactically more flexible (Gantar et al., 2019) and 
that collocations containing semantically very general collocates, which are 
often also very frequent, are semantically less informative and consequently 
lexicographically less relevant.
2.2 Syntactic criterion
As evident from various definitions (Moon, 1998; Hausmann, 1989; Kilgarriff 
et al., 2004; Seretan, 2010; Baldwin and Kim, 2010; Fellbaum, 2015), colloca-
tions are also defined by syntactic relations in which they occur, as well as their 
internal syntactic relationships. It is worth noting that all word combinations 
are not possible or syntactically correct and all (frequent) syntactically correct 
word combinations are not collocations (see also Section 3.1 on the distinction 
between collocations and free word combinations). Therefore, when consider-
ing syntactic criteria in defining collocation one must also consider the number 
of elements and their lexical value (semantic or grammatical word classes1 ver-
sus functional and modificational word classes), and relatedly also the order 
of elements in the collocation. Namely, the syntactic nature of word combina-
tions allows for element insertion (e.g. *organizirati mizo ‘to organize a table’ 
→ organizirati okroglo mizo ‘to organize a round table’) and adaptation to the 
context with opening valency positions (tekmovalni del ‘competition part’ → 
tekmovalni del programa ‘competition part of the programme’).
1 The expression grammatical collocation can also be found in literature (cf. Benson et 
al., 1986).
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I. KOSEM, S. KREK, P. GANTAR: Defining collocation for Slovenian lexical resources
As a result, automatic exctraction of lexically relevant collocations from the 
corpus warranted a careful description of syntactic structures (see Section 4 
for more). 
2.3 Semantic criterion
The semantic criterion is the most important criterion for distinguishing 
collocations from multiword lexical units and is at the same time the most 
difficult to specify. While statistical and syntactic criteria are more general-
ly accepted, the body of research on collocations uses one of the two basic 
approaches when considering their lexical characteristics. The first approach 
sees collocations as a separate type of phraseological units which is partly or 
completely (semantically and syntactically) fixed and has become established 
through regular contextual use. This definition includes especially so-called 
“phraseological” or “strong” collocations which are limited in lexical choice of 
its components (Halliday, 1966; Cowie, 1981; Sinclair, 1991), and are a rele-
vant part of mental lexicon. 
An example of a phraseological collocation, as put forward by Halliday, is the 
expression strong tea. While the same meaning could be conveyed by the 
roughly equivalent powerful tea, this expression is considered excessive and 
awkward by native English speakers. On the other hand, there are approach-
es that define collocations more broadly, i.e. as word combinations that are 
not limited or exclusive but rather allow longer (open) lists of collocates (e.g. 
herbal/camomile/pepermint/sage tea). Atkins and Rundell (2008, p. 167) 
define collocations as “… salient phrases in corpus citations [that] yet seem to 
have no idiomatic meaning” and “… a significantly frequent grouping of words 
whose meaning is quite transparent” (ibid., p. 223).
In general it can thus be said that collocations found in general dictionaries are 
not treated as lexical units that require an explanation of their meaning.2 The 
inclusion of collocations in dictionaries is due to the fact that they typically 
disambiguate meanings of polysemous words (e.g. king crown; Czech crown; 
dental crown) or are due to their widespread use typical of natural language 
2 This is not always true of collocation dictionaries, especially if they are targeted at non-
native speakers. Those dictionaries often include word combinations (e.g. compounds) 
that require explanations.
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use (pitch black, thick fog; but not *thick black). Their use is sometimes not 
only language-specific but also culture-specific (take a walk). We have thus 
selected the semantic criterion, or more specifically the lexicographer’s deci-
sion about the semantic transparency of word combination and consequently 
its inclusion among lexical units, as the point of departure of our typology of 
multiword lexical units. In our typology, presented in the following sections, 
collocations are excluded from the narrower phraseological framework, which 
is especially important for their role in the dictionary database.
3 COLLOCATIONS IN RELATION TO OTHER WORD COMBINATIONS 
The fact that the collocation is always a combination of at least two (usually 
lexical) words requires that we define their relationship towards other fre-
quent word combinations (free combinations) that represent certain syntactic 
combinations, but usually do not feature in dictionaries. At the same time, 
collocations need to be defined in terms of their relationship towards different 
kind of word combinations that behave like lexical units (i.e. multiword lexical 
units), and thus require a semantic description, or occupy some pragmatic 
and communication role (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Collocations in word combination typology.
3.1 Collocations and free combinations 
In our dictionary-driven typology collocations are distinguished from so-
called “free” word combinations mainly on the basis of their lexicographic 
relevance. For example, certain word combinations, which can be very fre-
quent but do not disambiguate meanings and contain delexicalised words, are 
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I. KOSEM, S. KREK, P. GANTAR: Defining collocation for Slovenian lexical resources
consequently semantically less informative. For example, free combinations 
such as in pri tem (‘and then’), nisem vedel (‘I didn’t know’), ta način (‘this 
way’) etc. are not considered as lexical units. Considering all three aforemen-
tioned criteria, we can say that free combinations are, similar to collocations, 
often frequent word combinations, but differ from collocations in the fact that 
they do not have any lexicographic value.
It should be noted that syntactic combinations that exhibit characteristics of 
free combinations can become lexicographically relevant units if they take on 
certain connective, modificational or discourse roles in the text. For exam-
ple, combinations such as glede tega (‘about this’) or zaradi tega (‘because 
of this’) have a role of text connectors, whereas the combination samo malo 
(‘only a little’ or ‘just a moment’) in certain contexts has a special discourse or 
pragmatic role and can be considered as a phraselogical unit.
3.2 Collocations and multiword lexical units
In defining collocations in relation to multiword lexical units (MLU),3 i.e. dif-
ferent multiword units that belong to lexicon and in a dictionary, our main 
criterion is that MLUs need to exhibit some degree of idiomatic meaning or 
behaviour.4 From the perspective of being considered for dictionary inclusion 
and description, they need to fulfil the criterion that their “meaning is more 
than the sum of the parts” (Atkins and Rundell, 2008, p. 167). This semantic 
criterion is, of course, relative and exclusively lexicographic. The judgement of 
a lexicographer whether a certain word combination requires its own seman-
tic description or not depends on the type of dictionary and its target user(s) 
(human or computer).
To be able to distinguish collocations from MLUs and determine their role 
in the dictionary database, we divided MLUs into three groups (Figure 2). 
3 Multiword expression and multiword lexical unit can be viewed as synonymous terms, 
however we decided for multiword lexical unit in order to stress the difference between 
units, which suggest a semantically independent whole, whereas expressions (and 
combinations) do not.
4 In this, we partially follow the definition of multiword expressions by Atkins and 
Rundell (2008), but it should be noted that under multiword expressions they also 
list transparent collocations which they define as “phrases … [that] seem to have no 
idiomatic meaning” (ibid., p. 167).
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Phraseological units and compounds require semantic description. The third 
group consists of different types of lexico-grammatical units such as light-
verb constructions that represent typical syntactic combinations in known 
syntactic and semantic roles. These units are not a standard part of diction-
aries, but when they are included, they come with certain lexico-grammatical 
information.5
Figure 2: Divison of multiword lexical units.
3.2.1 Compounds
Compounds are a type of multiword lexical units that require a description in 
the dictionary, given that their meaning cannot be deduced from the meaning 
of each component. In other words, their meaning is more than a sum of their 
parts. The main characteristic that distinguishes compounds from phraseo-
logical units in our typology is that they as a whole do not have a metaphori-
cal or expressive meaning; for example topla greda (‘greenhouse’ or ‘green-
house effect’): 1. A glass building in which plants are grown, 2. A process of the 
5 C.f. phrase more than in the Macmillan online dictionary: https://www.
macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/more-than
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I. KOSEM, S. KREK, P. GANTAR: Defining collocation for Slovenian lexical resources
earth’s surface warming up due to warmer atmosphere. Compounds typically 
carry a specific terminological or technical content, phenomenon or object; 
they normally have a concrete referent. The level of terminology varies, and 
sometimes it is difficult to determine their semantic independence that sepa-
rates them from collocations; for example trebušna votlina (‘visceral cavity’), 
jedilna žlica (‘soupspoon’), zeleni čaj (‘green tea’), osnovna šola (‘elementary 
school’) etc. The decision on whether these are terminological compounds or 
collocations is solely lexicographic, and is normally a part of dictionary’s style 
guide. When including them into the dictionary database these compounds 
can feature as collocations connected with the meaning of one of their compo-
nent elements, e.g. šola (‘school’ meaning institution): osnovna šola (‘prima-
ry school’, srednja šola (‘secondary school’), visoka šola (‘college’) etc., and 
at the same time as terminological units that require a definition: osnovna 
šola (‘primary school’) as “an official institution offering certain education”. 
In addition, compounds usually cannot be directly translated into another 
language, e.g. a direct translation of dnevna soba would be ‘day room’ rather 
than the actual translation ‘living room’. Similarly, a certain compound in one 
language is not a compound or a multiword unit in another, e.g. stara mama 
in Slovene means grandmother in English. In fact, we are aware that languag-
es such as German, Dutch and Norwegian are known for the high productivity 
of compounds, without space delimitation, however in such cases the formal 
criteron of single-word vs. multiword structure already acts as the main crite-
rion of distinguishing collocations from compounds.
Also, compounds of terminological and semi-terminological nature are mul-
tiword lexical units that are of metaphorical origin, but their role is primarily 
denotative and not expressive, e.g. črna luknja (‘black hole’) as a space phe-
nomenon. Such compounds can have a metaphorical meaning (among other 
meanings) which is consequently categorised in our typology under phraseo-
logical units.
3.2.2 Phraseological units
Phraseological units are also multiword lexical units with their own meaning. 
However, unlike compounds, phraseological units have a metaphorical mean-
ing (also called figurative or connotative meaning). From the communication 
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perspective, this means that when using them, one wants to say something in 
a more noticeable or expressive manner, differently. Also, in language there is 
normally a more neutral term with a similar meaning, e.g. to make a moun-
tain out of a molehill and exaggerate. We are therefore talking about phra-
seology (idiomatics) in its narrowest sense. It is worth pointing out that even 
within phraseological units we can find different types in terms of their struc-
ture and meaning, for example compound-like phraseological units (začarani 
krog, ‘catch-22’), sentence phraseological units or proverbs and sayings (čas 
je denar, ‘time is money’, počasi se daleč pride, ‘haste makes waste’), expres-
sions with pragmatic and evaluative role (za vraga, ‘damn’, kapo dol, ‘hats 
off’), and expressions in different adverbial (ena na ena, ‘one on one’, bolj ali 
manj, ‘more or less’) or communicative roles (dober večer, ‘good evening’, 
vesel božič, ‘Merry Christmas’).
3.2.3 Lexico-grammatical units
Another group of word combinations that needs to be distinguished from col-
locations (and free combinations) are lexico-grammatical units, i.e. frequent 
multiword units that also contain grammatical and function words. Unlike 
collocations, the role of lexico-grammatical units in the text is that of sentence 
or text organisation, which makes them relevant for dictionaries and thus dif-
ferentiates them from frequent free word combinations. Another characteris-
tic of lexico-grammatical units is that they show statistically significant co-oc-
currence in certain syntactic relations and are accompanied by predictable 
syntactic roles in their context.
Lexico-grammatical units include phrasal verbs and light-verb constructions, 
reflexive verbs, and syntactic combinations. Phrasal verbs include a verb and 
a preposition, often followed by a predictable valency position, e.g. priti do 
[sprememb, dogovora, napredka …] ‘result in [a change, an agreement, pro-
gress]’. Examples of light-verb constructions, which are formed by a verb that 
carries “less meaning in such constructions than in many other contexts” (At-
kins and Rundell, 2008, p. 175) and a noun, include biti v dvomih ‘to be in 
doubt’, imeti mnenje ‘to have an opinion’. Reflexive verbs contain a combina-
tion of a verb and a reflexive clitic; in many cases, a reflexive clitic is always 
found with the verb (e.g. zdeti se ‘to appear’; in other cases, the reflexive and 
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non-reflexive use of a verb have different meanings (e.g. ločiti se ‘to have a 
divorce’ vs. ločiti ‘to split’). Syntactic combinations overlap with free combina-
tions without any specific syntactic role, and also with pragmatic phraseolog-
ical units (to je to, ‘this is it’). They can have different roles in a sentence, for 
example they can be (a) adverbials (na prostem, ‘in the open’, pred leti, ‘years 
ago’, zadnje čase, ‘recently’, kar nekaj ‘quite a few’), (b) discourse markers (po 
besedah, ‘as stated by’, v bistvu, ‘actually’) and c) text connectors (glede na, 
‘according to’, medtem ko ‘while’, po eni strani – po drugi strani, ‘on the one 
hand – on the other hand’). 
4 C O L L O C A T I O N A S A D I C T I O N A R Y U N I T
So far, we defined collocation as a lexical phenomenon, i.e. as a string of 
words which (a) is statistically relevant, (b) has a predefined syntactic struc-
ture and (c) needs to be semantically transparent and meaningful. We also 
juxtaposed collocations with other word combinations, from free combina-
tions on the one hand to multiword lexical units with their own meaning 
on the other. We now need to also consider the criterion of dictionary rel-
evance. In this section, we present statistical, syntactic in semantic criteria 
when extracting collocations from a corpus with the aim of including them 
into digital dictionary database for Slovene. Furthermore, we outline the pa-
rameters for selection of those extracted collocation candidates that are suit-
able for inclusion in the Collocations Dictionary of Modern Slovene (Gorjanc 
et al., 2017).
4.1 Automatic extraction of collocation candidates
Automatic extraction of collocations from a corpus was conducted with the 
aim of creating a large digital dictionary database, with several satellite dic-
tionary databases (Klemenc et al., 2017), including the database of collo-
cations dictionary. The extraction was done in two stages, with each stage 
consisting of several extraction-evaluation iterations (Krek et al., 2016). The 
methodological decision was that automatically extracted data will be used for 
the Collocations Dictionary of Modern Slovene and immediately presented to 
the users, followed by regular updates of entries after lexicographic analysis 
(Kosem et al., 2018).
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4.1.1 Statistical parameters 
In the first stage of automatic extraction, collocation candidates were extract-
ed from the Gigafida reference corpus for Slovene (Logar et al., 2012), using 
a sample of 2,500 lemmas from the Slovene Lexical Database (Gantar et al., 
2016). We used grammatical relations6 in the Sketch Engine tool (Kilgarriff 
et al., 2004), using the Sketch Grammar for Slovene, written especially with 
automatic extraction in mind (Krek, 2016). Moreover, good examples for 
each collocation were extracted using the GDEX tool and the configuration 
for Slovene (Kosem et al., 2011). The second iteration of the extraction was 
conducted on 35,989 lemmas7 and contained over seven million collocations 
and slightly less than 35 million corpus examples (Krek et al., 2016). Both 
iterations of data extraction used the same lists of grammatical relations per 
word class, with lemmas divided into different frequency groups. Each fre-
quency group per word class used different settings for the following parame-
ters: minimum frequency of a collocate, minimum frequency of a grammatical 
relation, minimum salience (logDice value) of a collocate, minimum salience 
(logDice value) of a grammatical relation (Figure 3). All groups of lemmas 
shared the same limit of extracted collocates per grammatical relation and ex-
amples per collocation. More on the procedure of how exact parameter values 
were set can be found in Gantar et al. (2016).
One additional step used in the second iteration was the inclusion of col-
locations with higher raw frequency. This was done because we found that 
logDice sometimes gives low ranking to highly frequent and relevant col-
locations, which meant that the exported data, while focussing on statis-
tically more relevant collocations, could include an insufficient number of 
collocations for highly frequent and polysemous words to represent all the 
senses. Consequently, we performed and merged two extractions (using the 
same maximum limit of collocations per grammatical relation), one with 
collocations ranked by logDice, and the second one with collocates ranked 
6 Grammatical relations or gramrels are used in a narrow sense of the Sketch Engine 
terminology in this paper; they represent the definitions of syntactic structures in the 
sketch grammar.
7 The initial list contained 50,000 lemmas, but was reduced to 35,989 after removing the 
noise in the lemma list, excluding proper names and lemmas with frequency under 400 
occurrences in the corpus (deemed to contain very little useful collocational data).
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by raw frequency. Expectedly, there was often a significant overlap between 
the two lists.
4.1.2 Syntactic structures 
The first stage of automatic extraction of collocations used grammatical rela-
tions, defined in the sketch grammar file in the Sketch Engine tool. The gram-
matical relations included syntactic structures that were identified during lex-
icographic analysis. Initially, 528 syntactic structures were used (Krek et al., 
2016), with noun and verb structures being the most common, but syntactic 
structures with prepositions (and nouns in different cases) are also prevalent 
(Table 1), as is also the case in collocations dictionaries for other languages.
Table 1: Common collocation structures in collocations dictionary database
Most common collocation structures 
(Collocationas dictionary database)
Number of structures in the Collocationas 
dictionary database
1 NOUN + NOUNGENITIVE 1,783
2 VERB + NOUNACCUSATIVE 1,672
3 ADJ + NOUN 1,609
4 VERB + NOUNGENITIVE 1,598
5 VERB + PREP + NOUNINSTRUMENTAL 1,193
Figure 3: Parameter settings for different grammatical relations and their connections (red ar-
rows) with a table of the syntactic structure adjective + NOUN, illustrated with the results for the 
noun avtoriteta (‘authority’) in the Word Sketch function. 
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It is noteworthy that in the word sketch, collocates under grammatical rela-
tions are listed as individual words and in lemma form.8 Thus, in a morpho-
logically rich language like Slovene, collocate and the headword often need to 
be put in the correct form to adequately reflect their use in a particular gram-
matical relation. This can be because of gender and/or number agreement of 
the headword and the collocate (rdeč -> rdeča jagoda; jesenski -> jesensko 
listje), or because the headword or the collocate need to be in a certain case 
(i.e. olupiti jabolkoaccusative; črv v jabolkulocative). Moreover, additional elements 
(e.g. prepositions, conjunctions) were missing in relations with more than two 
elements, however in such cases the third element was always found in the 
same form. We solved this issue by automatically postprocessing the extracted 
data where each element of the grammatical relation (headword, collocate, 
preposition) was automatically attributed with their role in the collocation 
(using different tags) and written in the correct form (e.g. correct gender, case, 
number).
4.1.3 Semantic criteria
There were no specific semantic criteria set for the automatic extraction of 
collocations. We could say that the selection of grammatical relations already 
indirectly determined some semantics, as only lexical word classes (with the 
exception of prepositions and conjunctions in trinary grammatical relations, 
i.e. relations containing two lexical words and one function word) were used 
as collocation components. Also, the verb biti (‘be’) was excluded as a collocate 
in nearly all grammatical relation containing verbs. Other than that, no other 
criteria were used, as we wanted to induce semantic criteria (and potentially 
other statistical and syntactic criteria) from the evaluation with the users.
4.2 Evaluation 
Evaluation of the automatically extracted collocation data comprised of three 
separate studies. The first one was conducted with dictionary users (students, 
translators etc.) on the initiallly extracted data for 2,500 lemmas (Krek et 
al., 2016), which were available online as the Database of the Collocations 
8 It has to be mentioned that the COLLOC directive in the Sketch Engine enables the 
extraction of collocations as bigrams/trigrams and in particular word forms, but this 
directive was introduced after the extraction has already been performed.
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I. KOSEM, S. KREK, P. GANTAR: Defining collocation for Slovenian lexical resources
Dictionary. The focus was more on the interface features (layout of informa-
tion, clarity etc.), but included also questions on the presentation of colloca-
tions and on the benefits and shortcomings of automatically extracted data.
The second study was done with lexicographers (and linguists) on the 35,989 
lemmas dataset, using the Pybossa platform. Lexicographers inspected 17,576 
collocations in 143 different grammatical relations for 333 different lemmas 
(Pori and Kosem, 2018), with at least three lexicographers “voting” on each 
collocation. They were presented with the information of the grammatical 
relation, collocation and one example, and were given various options. The 
optional answers were grouped into Yes, No and I don’t know, however Yes 
and No options had suboptions, e.g. Yes had the suboption that the collocation 
is OK but the form displayed is not, for example when the collocation should 
have been in plural. The first findings of the study, with focus on grammatical 
relations containing adverbs, were presented in Pori and Kosem (2018). 
The third study by Pori et al. (2020) combined the approaches of both pre-
vious studies by focussing on the user perceptions of automatically extracted 
collocational data for 35,989 lemmas, as presented in the Collocations Dic-
tionary of Modern Slovene. One important aspect of the study is the fact that 
lexicographers represent one of the user groups, and their perceptions of the 
value and problems of automatically extracted data can be directly compared 
with other types of users.
The findings of all three studies, which point to problems of automatic col-
location identification and extraction and are relevant for this paper, can be 
divided into four interconnected topics:
• shortcomings related to corpus data,
• shortcomings related to syntactic criteria,
• shortcomings related to statistical criteria,
• shortcomings related to dictionary relevance.
4.2.1 Shortcomings related to corpus data
Many errors that occur during automatic extraction of collocation stem from 
problems in corpus annotation, i.e. lemmatisation (e.g. *piliti alkohol -> piti 
16 17
Slovenščina 2.0, 2020 (2)
alkohol) and part-of-speech tagging (e.g. mixing between adjectives and ad-
verbs (*težek do alkohola ‘difficult to alcohol’ -> težje do alkohola ‘more diffi-
cult to get alcohol’) or between adjectives and nouns (*premagati poljski ‘beat 
Polish’ – premagati poljsko ‘beat Poland’) that share forms. The first stage of 
automatic extraction was conducted on the Gigafida corpus, which was auto-
matically tagged using the JOS tagset, with the accuracy of tagging reaching 
97.88% at lemma level, and 91.34% at the level of all morphosyntactic tags 
(Grčar et al., 2012). Quite problematic for syntactic criteria were also errors 
in annotation of cases when the forms were the same, e.g. nominative and 
accusative of inanimate nouns, or genitive singular and nominative plural of 
feminine nouns.
Collocation identification was also influenced by certain linguistic decisions 
related to corpus annotation. For example, in hyphenated forms such as slad-
ko-kisla omaka (‘sweet-sour sauce’), each part of the hyphenated combina-
tion was annotated separately; thus, only collocations such as sladka oma-
ka (‘sweet sauce’) and kisla omaka (‘sour sauce’) were extracted. Similarly, 
nominalised adjectives such as zaposleni (‘the employed’) were annotated as 
adjectives and thus not found in grammatical relations containing nouns.
4.2.2 Shortcomings related to syntactic criteria
The problems of corpus annotation also affected syntactic criteria, or better 
said, the quality of collocational output at different grammatical relations. 
The sketch grammar is tagset-based, which means that grammatical relations 
must be defined via tags rather than e.g. syntactic relation identified by pars-
ers. Aforementioned problems of incorrect case annotation therefore result-
ed in wrong grammatical relation attribution, e.g. *botrovati alkohol (‘caus-
es alcohol’; verb + nounaccusative) rather than alkohol botruje (‘alcohol causes’; 
nounnominative + verb). Similarly, adjectives could be incorrectly identified as at-
tributive even when used only predicatively, e.g. *priložena miška (‘included 
mouse’) instead of miška je priložena (‘mouse is included’) or *kriv hormon 
(‘responsible hormones’) instead of hormoni so krivi (hormones are responsi-
ble (for)). Such combinations, while syntactically correct, do not form mean-
ingful collocations, which means that the expected syntactic relation had to be 
more narrowly defined on the syntactic/tree level.
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I. KOSEM, S. KREK, P. GANTAR: Defining collocation for Slovenian lexical resources
There were also cases when one grammatical relation was a limited version 
of another one, often resulting in duplication of collocations. For example, 
the collocation vulkanskega izvora (‘of volcanic origin’) was extracted in the 
grammatical relation adjectivegenitive + noungenitive; however, the genitive form 
was also included in the grammatical relation adjective + noun (agreement in 
all possible cases) as the collocation vulkanski izvor (‘volcanic origin’). Yet, 
such collocations have different syntactic roles, as an attributive or subject/
object respectively. Thus, it is important to define grammatical relations more 
narrowly in such cases.
The evaluation made it clear that certain grammatical relations contained 
much more noise, i.e. they contained many more bad collocation candidates. 
Whereas certain grammatical relations exhibited issues in general, at many 
different lemmas (e.g. noun + noungenitive), others were problematic only at cer-
tain types of lemmas (e.g. inanimate nouns in the grammatical relation verb 
+ nounaccusative). Furthermore, certain grammatical relations (e.g. verb + noun-
genitive) contained such an overwhelming percentage of noise that they were ex-
cluded from the collocations dictionary altogether.9
A problem related to good/bad collocation identification at certain grammat-
ical relations, especially those with errors in case annotation, is related to the 
fact that at first glance such collocations look good (e.g. izolirati bakterije ‘iso-
late bacteria’ in the relation verb + noungenitive; when it is verb + nounaccusative (in 
plural); only when considering both their form and the grammatical relation 
they are found in one can discard them as bad. This is of course more prob-
lematic when lay users, which perhaps pay less attention to accompanying 
grammatical information, are confronted with automatically extracted data.
4.2.3 Shortcomings related to statistical criteria
We have already mentioned problems linked to the selection of statistical 
method for collocation, which led to additional extraction of collocations 
ranked by raw frequency. Moreover, the parameters set for extraction had 
to be adjusted for different groups of lemmas according to their word class, 
grammatical relation, and corpus frequency. Despite these rather detailed 
9 These grammatical relations may of course be added to the subsequent versions of the 
collocations dictionary.
18 19
Slovenščina 2.0, 2020 (2)
criteria, problems were still observed on both ends of frequency ranking, i.e. 
at very frequent and very rare lemmas. For very frequent lemmas, the lists of 
extracted collocations were often too short, especially in the most common 
grammatical relations, resulting in non-coverage of certain (still salient) sens-
es of the words. In fact, in such cases, the maximum number of collocations 
was often the only criterion that had to be used, as all the other were not even 
met (e.g. minimum collocation frequency). Similar problem with left out col-
locations was observed at very rare lemmas (i.e. rare as on the bottom end 
of our threshold of 400 hits in the corpus), but the reason was different; the 
problem occurred mainly because of collocation dispersion, i.e. there were 
many collocations in the grammatical relation belonging to the same semantic 
type (and representing the same sense), and while their joint frequency was 
very high, their individual frequency was below the minimum threshold and 
they were thus not extracted.
Additional issues that have come up during the evaluation were heavily linked 
to aforementioned errors in corpus annotation, and relatedly, errors in gram-
matical relation attribution. First and foremost, this includes collocation can-
didates that were always errors, and pushed down the ranking (and some-
times off the list of extracted data) other, good, collocations. However, there 
were also cases when syntactic problems were not absolute, i.e. the collocation 
was good but its statistics was misleading as the concordances included many 
incorrectly identified cases, in certain cases to the level where the number of 
good collocation examples was even below the minimum threshold of 4. For 
example, čakati nastop ‘await a performance’ is a good collocation in the verb 
+ nounaccusative structure, but examples contained many (incorrect) cases of 
nastop čaka ‘a performance awaits’. 
Collocation ranking is also interesting from the perspective of dictionary us-
ers. While one of the association measures seems the logical choice for col-
location ordering in a dictionary as it reflects the nature of collocation, our 
initial research (Arhar Holdt, in press) has shown that this is not in line with 
the expectations of the users who clearly prefer (or expect?) frequency. Fur-
ther evidence that this problem is not trivial is the practice of some diction-
aries (e.g. see Hudeček and Mihajlević, 2020) that avoid any mention of sta-
tistics and list collocations by alphabet (only). In the case of our dictionary of 
19
I. KOSEM, S. KREK, P. GANTAR: Defining collocation for Slovenian lexical resources
collocations, we used a solution where logDice ranking was used as the default 
one, and an option of switching to alphabetical ranking was made available to 
the users.
4.2.4 Shortcomings related to dictionary relevance
The evaluation of automatically extracted collocational data from the perspec-
tive of dictionary relevance was conducted manually and with the aim of iden-
tifying criteria for the selection of collocations for our database, and for the 
presentation in the dictionary interface. We focussed mainly on determining 
the informative value of collocations (strong vs. weak collocations), the in-
formative value of the entire grammatical relation, and the predominant form 
of collocation in corpus examples.
Evaluation clearly identified different levels of collocability between colloca-
tion elements, which considerably determine the dictionary relevance of the 
collocation. As already discussed at the typology of word combinations, col-
locations can exhibit very strong internal link (e.g. trda tema ‘pitch black’, 
debela denarnica ‘thick wallet’). On the other hand, there are headwords 
without any strong collocates, where “just about any word can (and does) 
combine with words like these [house, buy and good], as long as the combi-
nation makes sense.”10 While we did not exclude words like house and buy 
from our lemma list, collocations evaluated as weak often included seman-
tically broad collocates such as certain types of adverbs (Pori and Kosem, 
2018), e.g. malo ‘little’, zelo ‘very’, adjectives (e.g. proper adjectives like 
slovenski ‘Slovenian’, angleški ‘English’ etc. and temporal adjectives like 
nov ‘new’, star ‘old’, nekdanji ‘recent’, bivši ‘former’), verbs (e.g. the verb 
biti ‘be’ and modal verbs), and words which feature in different syntactic 
roles (e.g. pronouns, adjuncts, certain adverbs, e.g. kar ‘quite’, nekaj ‘some’, 
samo ‘only’, okoli ‘about’, veliko ‘many’). 
While these weak collocations were not considered relevant for the inclusion 
in the dictionary, they were still kept in the database because they met sta-
tistical and syntactic criteria and might be relevant for some other resource. 
In fact, it is important to note that the record of all good (strong and weak) 
10 M. Rundell: How the dictionary was created: http://www.macmillandictionaries.com/
features/how-dictionaries-are-written/macmillan-collocations-dictionary/.
20 21
Slovenščina 2.0, 2020 (2)
and bad collocation candidates should be kept in the database, and used for 
comparison in future automatic extractions, so that the duplication of work 
is avoided.
Interestingly, certain collocation candidates containing weak collocates often 
represent a part of units belonging to other word combinations in our typol-
ogy. Such collocation candidates themselves are often semantically nonsensi-
cal and parts of other lexico-grammatical units, e.g. *formalen smisel ‘formal 
sense’ is actually part of v formalnem smislu ‘in a formal sense’, or zveza z 
gradnjo ‘relation to contruction’ is actually part of v zvezi z gradnjo ‘in rela-
tion to construction’. Continuous adding syntactic relations identified through 
(bad) collocations to our list enables the extraction of such units from the cor-
pus, as well as avoiding identification of bad collocations.
A very specific issue in terms of dictionary relevance of collocation candidates 
were collocations related to proper names, i.e. collocations that are proper 
names themselves and often reflect some cultural or language (e.g. Vesele Šta-
jerke ‘Happy Styrians’, which is the name of a band) and collocations with a 
collocate that is a proper name (e.g prestolnica Lombardije ‘capital of Lom-
bardy’). Such cases are not clear cut, which was also evident from the level of 
(dis)agreement among evaluators; while cases like Vesele Štajerke were seen 
as irrelevant for the collocations dictionary by all the evaluators,11 prestolnica 
Lombardije showed less agreement as many believed the collocation was rele-
vant as it was a representation of a highly salient and sense indicative combi-
nation prestolnica + country/region. In sum, while there are good arguments 
to include these types of collocations in dictionaries (see e.g. Hudeček and Mi-
haljević, 2020), we decided to treat such collocations separately as multiword 
named entities in the database.
Statistics is an essential part of collocation, and this goes beyond its constitu-
ent parts. A very important part of collocation not only at its identification but 
also in presentation to dictionary users is its predominant form. Two frequent-
ly problematized issues during evaluation was number for nouns and degree 
for adjectives. Semantic characteristics of several headwords either require 
or prefer non-singular form (plural or dual), e.g. *stresti bonbon ‘dispense 
11 In general we consider encyclopaedic information as not relevant for the collocations 
dictionary.
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I. KOSEM, S. KREK, P. GANTAR: Defining collocation for Slovenian lexical resources
bonbon’ instead of stresti bonbone ‘dispense bonbons’, or finančna težava 
‘financial trouble’ instead of finančne težave ‘financial troubles’. Similarly, 
typicality of collocation can be limited to the adjective in a certain form e.g. 
superlative, as in *blizek sorodnik -> najbližji sorodniki ‘closest relatives’.12 
All these collocations, if presented in the ‘basic form’, do not reflect typical use 
or even appear strange, which means that future extractions should consider 
the predominant form. A similar approach is already used in the Sketch En-
gine word sketches in the form of longest-commonest match (Kilgarriff et al., 
2015), however the feature still needs improving as it does not always provide 
a result or often offers a sequence which is longer than the collocation.13
5 C O N C L U S I O N S
Collocations are a highly relevant type of word combinations, and are defined 
by three types of criteria: statistical, syntactic and semantic. As shown in the 
paper, all three types are heavily interlinked, and each brings different deci-
sions and problems. Equally important as these three types of criteria for any 
dictionary project is defining collocations in relation to other word combina-
tions, i.e. free combinations and multiword lexical units; as we pointed out 
free combinations do not have any lexicographic value, whereas multiword 
lexical units do but they also require a description as their meaning is more 
than the sum of their parts. By knowing the typology in detail one can make 
better decisions as to which category the candidate word combination belongs.
Yet, as our evaluation of automatically extracted collocational data has shown, 
practical application of a theoretical framework brings new challenges, associat-
ed with the quality of corpus annotation, the purpose of the dictionary, and the 
expectations and needs of dictionary users. The challenges are mainly two-fold, 
with the common theme being the amount of collocations. Firstly, there is the 
need to separate the wheat from the chaff, i.e. bad collocation candidates from 
12 We intentionally do not provide an English translation for the bad collocation candidate, 
as in English a collocation with close in its basic form and relative actually exists, 
whereas in Slovene the word form (and lemma) blizek is merely an artifical contruct of 
the basic form of this particular adjective (and is very rarely found in the corpus, and 
never with sorodnik).
13 This function in the Sketch Engine can be useful when identifying bad collocates or 
multiword units such as v zvezi z gradnjo 'in relation to construction' mentioned above.
22 23
Slovenščina 2.0, 2020 (2)
the good ones, caused by problems in corpus annotation or problems stemming 
from the identification of collocation on the basis of part-of-speech tags. Sec-
ondly, there is the question of dictionary relevance, the decision of which cannot 
be left (only) to statistical measures for collocation identification but is rather 
mainly semantic, and driven by the target users of the dictionary.
What our experience has shown is that the collocation is defined by statistical, 
syntactic, and semantic criteria, however these criteria are not set in stone, 
and cannot be generalized across the language (i.e. they cannot be the same 
for different types of words). Constant evaluation and improvement of the cri-
teria is required. The Slovenian language as a morphologically rich language 
is particularly problematic as far as the syntactic criteria are concerned. Our 
efforts to improve the quality of automatic collocation identification are cur-
rently directed mainly in this direction. Thus, we are testing the extraction of 
collocations from a parsed corpus, using 76 collocational structures that have 
been ‘translated’ from the definitions of grammatical relations for a part-of-
speech tagged corpus. Initial results are promising and this approach seems 
to definitely solve a few existing problems (e.g. collocation form in terms of 
case and number as well as typicality, and the amount of bad candidates), but 
is likely to require some fine-tuning. 
We are not neglecting the statistical and semantic aspects, though. On the 
statistical level, we are exploring the measures such as deltaP (Gries, 2013) 
to determine the symmetry of collocations, i.e. to establish which collocations 
are relevant only for one of its constituent parts. On the semantic level, we 
want to explore the characteristics of weak collocates and prepare stop lists, 
probably for different groups of lemmas. Most importantly, we are including 
all these activities in our efforts to compile a common digital database for Slo-
vene where collocations, and all other word combinations, will be available to 
the research community and creators of language resources.
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge that the project Collocation as a basis for language 
description: semantic and temporal perspectives (J6-8255) was financially 
supported by the Slovenian Research Agency, and acknowledge the finan-
cial support from the Slovenian Research Agency (research core funding No. 
23
I. KOSEM, S. KREK, P. GANTAR: Defining collocation for Slovenian lexical resources
P6-0411, Language Resources and Technologies for Slovene) and P6-0215 
Slovene Language - Basic, Contrastive, and Applied Studies. 
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 
research and innovation program under grant agreement No 731015.
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OPREDELITEV KOLOKACIJ V LEKSIKALNIH 
VIRIH ZA SLOVENŠČINO
V prispevku definiramo pojem kolokacije za namene vključitve v strojno proceslji-
ve jezikovne vire, ki bodo služili izdelavi elektronskih jezikovnih priročnikov in 
različnih jezikovnih aplikacij za slovenščino. Na podlagi teoretičnih in slovarsko 
usmerjenih študij definiramo kolokacijo kot leksikalni jezikovni pojav, pri čemer 
izhajamo iz treh ključnih vidikov: statističnega, skladenjskega, in pomenskega. 
Kot izhodišče za opredelitev kolokacij znotraj vseh besednih kombinacij v jezi-
ku in za ločevanje kolokacij od prostih besednih zvez štejemo njihovo slovarsko 
relevantnost. Proste besedne zveze v jeziku obstajajo kot (pogoste) skladenjsko 
ustrezne besedne kombinacije, ki pa nimajo slovarske vrednosti v smislu pomen-
skega opisa ali opisa njihove skladenjske ali gramatične vloge. Nadaljnja delitev 
temelji na slovarsko-semantičnem kriteriju, ki ločuje kolokacije od vseh drugih 
slovarsko relevantnih enot na podlagi leksikografske odločitve, da besedna zveza 
potrebuje opis pomena (t. i. večbesedne leksikalne enote). Pri naši opredelitvi 
kolokacije ne potrebujejo pomenskega opisa, kar jih v temelju ločuje od zvez z 
neidiomatičnim pomenom (stalne besedne zveze), različnih frazeoloških enot 
pa tudi od t. i. leksikalno-gramatičnih enot, ki imajo primarno besedilno pov-
ezovalne in druge skladenjske vloge. Pri opredeljevanju kolokacij kot slovarskih 
enot se znova vrnemo k trem ključnim kriterijem, ki jih podrobneje opišemo z 
vidika avtomatskega luščenja kolokacijskih podatkov iz korpusov. Slovarska rele-
vantnost izluščenih kolokacij je izpostavila predvsem problem semantično odpr-
tih kolokatorjev, kot so določeni tipi prislovov, pridevnikov in glagolov, in besed, 
ki se pojavljajo v različnih skladenjskih vlogah (e.g. zaimki in členki). Posebej 
opišemo problem lastnoimenskih kolokatorjev in odločitve pri vključevanju takih 
primerov v slovar na podlagi evalvacije med leksikografi.
Ključne besede: kolokacija, večbesedna leksikalna enota, besedna kombinacija, 
slovenščina, leksikografija, slovarska baza
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