1. A method, implemented by a computing system comprising one or more processors, the method comprising: comparing, using one or more of the processors, one or more collocations from a text sample with a corpus; identifying, using one or more of the processors, whether the collocations are disfavored in the corpus; and providing indications of whether the collocations are disfavored via an output device; in which comparing the collocations with the corpus comprises performing one or more searches of the World Wide Web using one or more query terms that comprise each of one or more of the collocations; and in which for each of one or more of the collocations for which searches are performed, a search is performed for each of the one or more query terms that comprise the collocation until either one of the query terms provides search results that meet a preselected threshold for matching the collocation, or all the query terms that comprise the collocation are used without meeting the preselected threshold, and further comprising: composing one or more query terms with a wild card replacing a word in one of the disfavored collocations; searching a word collocation reference for the query terms; identifying results of the search having a relatively high proportion of a candidate word replacing the wild card; and providing the results of the search having the candidate word via the output device as potentially proper word collocations.
1. A method, implemented by a computing system comprising one or more processors, the method comprising: comparing, using one or more of the processors, one or more collocations from a text sample with a corpus; identifying, using one or more of the processors, whether the collocations are disfavored in the corpus; and providing indications of whether the collocations are disfavored via an output device; in which comparing the collocations with the corpus comprises performing one or more searches of the World Wide Web using one or more query terms that comprise each of one or more of the collocations; and in which for each of one or more of the collocations for which searches are performed, a search is performed for each of the one or more query terms that comprise the collocation until either one of the query terms provides search results that meet a preselected threshold for matching the collocation, or all the query terms that comprise the collocation are used without meeting the preselected threshold, and further comprising: composing one or more query terms with a wild card replacing a word in one of the disfavored collocations; searching a word collocation reference for the query terms; identifying results of the search having a relatively high proportion of a candidate word replacing the wild card; and providing the results of the search having the candidate word via the output device as potentially proper word collocations. 13. The method of claim 1 , wherein the query terms comprise one or more of a sentence template, a chunk template, and a word template, and wherein the results of the search having a relatively high proportion of the candidate word replacing the wild card are evaluated by multiplying a proportion of the search results that comprise the candidate word by a query template weight that is highest for the sentence template, lower for the chunk template, and lowest for the word template.