Refers to the techniques used to detect patterns of words that appear together in a text more often than would be expected by chance. A collocation is a group or pair of words that are always used together, and can illustrate restrictions on which verbs or adjectives can be used with particular nouns, or the order in which words appear.

Some examples of collocations include:

• Fast food
• Crystal clear
• Make a decision
• Take a test
• Black and white

Collocations can be automatically extracted from a text, using specialist computer software, in a process called ‘collocation extraction’. This software uses mathematical formulae to calculate the frequency that particular words appear together, and evaluates whether this is likely to be statistically significant or purely coincidence.

Related methods include: Data mining and Text mining.