Review of software applications for deriving collocations

The field of collocation extraction has enjoyed considerable growth and vitality from the 1990s onwards. Our research uncovered a multitude of software programs that can derive collocations from textual data, but also introduced the following question: Which one is the most fitting for the task of extracting collocations from a corpus? This paper attempts to answer the previous question. We start by stating the criteria on which we based our judgement of the software applications included in our review. We then move on to give a brief description of each package, in terms of its functions, merits and demerits. We conclude by stating which of the packages was deemed, according to our opinion, the most appropriate for our purposes and provide a summary table of the results of the software review.