A brief tutorial on using collocations for uncovering and contrasting meaning potentials of lexical items
Rainer Perkuhn, Holger Keibel · Publication Server of the Institute for German Language (Institute for German Language) · 2009
This introductory tutorial describes a strictly corpus-driven approach for uncovering indications for aspects of use of lexical items. These aspects include ‘(lexical) meaning’ in a very broad sense and involve different dimensions, they are established in and emerge from respective discourses. Using data-driven mathematical-statistical methods with minimal (linguistic) premises, a word’s usage spectrum is summarized as a collocation profile. Self-organizing methods are applied to visualize the complex similarity structure spanned by these profiles. These visualizations point to the typical aspects of a word’s use, and to the common and distinctive aspects of any two words.