Computation of Word Associations Based on Co-occurrences of Words in Large Corpora
Manfred Wettler, Reinhard Rapp · 1993
A statistical model is presented which predicts the strengths of word-associations from the relative frequencies of the common occurrences of words in large bodies of text. These predictions are compared with the Minnesota association norms for 100 stimulus words. The average agreement between the predicted and the observed responses is only slightly weaker than the agreement between the responses of an arbitrary subject and the responses of the other subjects. It is shown that the approach leads to equally good results for both English and German. 1 Introduction In the association experiment first used by Galton (1880) subjects are asked to respond to a stimulus word with the first word that comes to their mind. These associative responses have been explained in psychology by the principle of learning by contiguity: "Objects once experienced together tend to become associated in the imagination, so that when any one of them is thought of, the others are likely to be thought of also,...