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<Paper uid="C02-1007">
  <Title>The Computation of Word Associations: Comparing Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Approaches</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> According to Ferdinand de Saussure (1916), there are two fundamental types of relations between words that he believes correspond to basic operations of our brain: syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations. There is a syntagmatic relation between two words if they co-occur in spoken or written language more frequently than expected from chance and if they have different grammatical roles in the sentences in which they occur. Typical examples are the word pairs coffee - drink, sun hot, or teacher - school. The relation between two words is paradigmatic if the two words can substitute for one another in a sentence without affecting the grammaticality or acceptability of the sentence. Typical examples are synonyms or antonyms like quick - fast, or eat - drink. Normally, words with a paradigmatic relation are the same part of speech, whereas words with a syntagmatic relation can but need not be the same part of speech.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In this paper we want to show that the two types of relations as defined by de Saussure are reflected in the statistical distribution of words in large corpora. We present algorithms that automatically retrieve words with either the syntagmatic or the paradigmatic type of relationship from corpora and perform a quantitative evaluation of our results.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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