The Contextualized Representation of Collocation

Collocate list and collocation network are two widely used representation methods of collocations, but they have significant weaknesses in representing contextual information. To solve this problem, we propose a new representation method, namely the contextualized representation of collocate (CRC), which highlights the importance of the position of the collocates and pins a collocate as the interaction of two dimensions: association strength and co-occurrence position. With a full image of all the collocates surrounding the node word, CRC carries the contextual information and makes the representation more informative and intuitive. Through three case studies, i.e., synonym distinction, image analysis, and efficiency in lexical use, we demonstrate the advantages of CRC in practical applications. CRC is also a new quantitative tool to measure lexical usage pattern similarities for corpus-based research. It can provide a new representation framework for language researchers and learners.