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Collocation analysis

TCSE provides collocation analysis to help you discover which words frequently co-occur with your search term. This is valuable for understanding natural word combinations and improving vocabulary knowledge.

How to access

  1. Click on Collocation to switch to Collocation mode
  2. Enter a search word

  3. Click on the Colloc 2 or Colloc 3 tab

  4. Colloc 2: Shows 2-word collocations (bigrams containing your search term)

  5. Colloc 3: Shows 3-word collocations (trigrams containing your search term)

Colloc 2 and Colloc 3 tabs in Collocation mode

Sort options

You can sort collocation results by different statistical measures:

Measure Description
MI (Mutual Information) Measures how strongly two words are associated. Higher values indicate stronger, often more specific collocations.
t-score Balances association strength with frequency. Tends to highlight frequent, reliable collocations.
Freq (Frequency) Simple co-occurrence frequency count.
DP (Delta P) Directional association measure. Shows how much more likely word B is given word A, compared to its overall probability.

Collocation results sorted by MI score

Lemma-based grouping

Collocation results are grouped by lemma (base form). This means that all inflected forms of a word are combined into a single entry. For example, searching for "make" will show:

  • "make + mistake" (freq=109) — combining "make a mistake", "makes mistakes", "made a mistake", etc.
  • "make + decision" (freq=218) — combining all forms

This gives a more accurate picture of the true collocational strength between words. Hover over a lemma to see all the surface forms that were aggregated. Click on a row to search for all instances using lemma search syntax.

Collocation network

For a visual overview of collocational relationships, use the Network tab. See Collocation Network for details.

Tips

  • MI scores tend to highlight rare but strongly associated pairs
  • t-scores are better for finding common, reliable collocations useful for learners
  • Try different sort options to get different perspectives on word combinations
  • Click on any collocation to search for its instances in the transcript corpus
  • Hover over a lemma cell to see all surface form variants