There is a lot of interest at present in the feature of collocation, the co-occurrence of words within a short span in a text. Collocation is both linguistically powerful and easy to identify in computational processes. It is notable that collocation is used as a criterion both for topic and style, which may help to explain its popularity.
In topic, the clustering of collocates helps in disambiguation of the individual words, and gives a more accurate identification of the topic of the text than simple keywords. In style, types of word conbination are clues to style types. More recently, collocation has been used to classify genres, showing that the same word is characteristically associated with certain collocates in particular types of writing and speaking.