Lexical dispersion and corpus design
Jesse Egbert, Brent D. Burch, Douglas Biber
Abstract
Abstract Lexical dispersion is typically measured across arbitrary corpus parts of equal size. In this study, we apply D A – a new dispersion index designed for unequal-sized corpus parts – to the British National Corpus (BNC) in a series of cases studies to show that the dispersion of a word is strongly influenced by the corpus units or parts it is measured across. Our results show that dispersion should be measured and interpreted based on corpus units that are linguistically meaningful for a particular research goal. We conclude with recommendations to help researchers select meaningful corpus units for measuring and interpreting lexical dispersion.
Topics & Concepts
Corpus linguisticsDispersion (optics)Computer scienceNatural language processingWord (group theory)LinguisticsArtificial intelligenceIndex (typography)Lexical itemWorld Wide WebPhilosophyPhysicsOpticsNatural Language Processing TechniquesSecond Language Acquisition and LearningAuthorship Attribution and Profiling