What do (some of) our association measures measure (most)? Association?
Stefan Τh. Gries
Abstract
Abstract This paper discusses the degree to which some of the most widely-used measures of association in corpus linguistics are not particularly valid in the sense of actually measuring association rather than some amalgam of a lot of frequency and a little association. The paper demonstrates these issues on the basis of hypothetical and actual corpus data and outlines implications of the findings. I then outline how to design an association measure that only measures association and show that its behavior supports the use of the log odds ratio as a true association-only measure but separately from frequency; in addition, this paper sets the stage for an analogous review of dispersion measures in corpus linguistics.
Topics & Concepts
Association (psychology)Measure (data warehouse)OddsWord AssociationLinguisticsPsychologyStatisticsComputer scienceMathematicsPhilosophyData miningLogistic regressionPsychotherapistNatural Language Processing TechniquesSecond Language Acquisition and LearningAuthorship Attribution and Profiling