Possible measures of asymmetry and redundancy in collocations
Robert Nelson · Journal of Research Design and Statistics in Linguistics and Communication Science · 2015
It has long been recognized that developing measures of the internal structure of collocations is an important goal (Sinclair, 1991). Recently, Gries’ (2013) presented a measure that captures the asymmetric nature of conditional probabilities in collocations. This paper intends to contribute to the discussion by introducing measures of asymmetry and redundancy that may meet the needs of some researchers. Two asymmetry measures are described. The first captures only frequency asymmetry while the second is an asymmetric version of the mutual information measure. A measure of semantic redundancy is also described here. This measure takes a higher value when the fact that two words co occur contains more information than the uncertainty introduced by the occurrence of the individual words.