Terminology 15:2 (2009), 258–283. doi 10.1075/term.15.2.05lho issn 0929–9971 / e-issn 1569–9994 © John Benjamins Publishing Company Combining the semantics of collocations with situation-driven search paths in specialized dictionaries Marie-Claude L’Homme and Patrick Leroyer Te systematic presentation of collocations is increasingly recognized as a very useful addition to specialized reference works. However, few dictionaries or terminological databases actually include this kind of data. More surprisingly still, no method has been designed yet to allow efcient access to and retrieval of specifc specialized collocations from electronic reference tools. Tis article presents two new search paths for accessing and extracting collocations from an English-French specialized lexical database. Te paths have been designed according to two specifc user-defned situations: (1) translation from L1 to L2; and (2) text production in L2. We exploit a formal semantic encoding of colloca- tions based on Lexical Functions (LFs). LFs allow us to establish an equivalence relationship between collocations that convey the same meaning in diferent languages without having to link the collocations formally. Tey also allow us to extract sets of collocations associated with specifc meanings. Keywords: collocation, terminology, specialized lexicography, equivalent, lexical relation, lexical function, search paths, lexicographic functions 1. Introduction Te systematic presentation of collocations is ofen recognized as an extremely useful addition to specialized dictionaries (Bergenholtz and Tarp 1995; Heid and Freibott 1991, Schneider 1998, among others). Te listing of collocations is viewed as a solution to the gap between needs raised by the production of texts (especially in L2) as well as in L1 to L2 1 translation — two communicative activities in which terms need to be placed in a linguistic and discursive environment (Leroyer 2001) — and the actual information provided by specialized dictionaries (ofen reduced to short articles specifying the conceptual content of nouns and noun phrases).