Term distance, frequency and collocations
Lars G. Johnsen · Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. Series 4, Current issues in linguistic theory · 2021
Abstract In this paper I study two co-occurrence measures, local to a particular corpus, for constructing collocations or relevance relations between words or terms. One is a distance measure, while the other uses different co-occurrence windows, one contained in the other. Both are discussed with respect to the common method of comparing co-occurrence measures within a particular corpus to those of a reference corpus. A practical consequence of these measures is that they may relieve the burden of computing a reference statistic, which may incur a high computational cost. We also believe that distance, as a measure in itself, has a theoretical interest. Being different from frequency, it may add something new to collocation analysis.