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.

In this paper, we describe a method for automatically retrieving collocations from large text corpora. This method retrieve collocations in the following stages: 1) extracting strings of characters as units of collocations 2) extracting recurrent combinations of strings in accordance with their word order in a corpus as collocations. Through the method, various range of collocations, especially domain specific collocations, are retrieved. The method is practical because it uses plain texts without any information dependent on a language such as lexical knowledge and parts of speech.