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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman" color=#000000>Hello Colleagues! </FONT></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman" color=#000000>A question about ‘key-ness’, and key words, in a group of texts…</FONT></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman" color=#000000>I’ve been mulling over some ‘key-ness’ statistics for a selection of texts I’ve been studying and a rather odd question has occurred to me….</FONT></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman" color=#000000>I’ve been attempting to discover something of the thematic content or ‘about-ness’ of a group of texts by using a keywords analysis, comparing the word frequency profile of the selection of texts with a comparative group to derive ‘key-ness’ (via log-likelihood) stats for each word. </FONT></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"><FONT color=#000000>The key-ness value returned by such a procedure can be misleading because of the problem of dispersal; is the word <SPAN style="COLOR: black">‘key’ because it occurs in a lot of text samples in the corpus or because of a very high usage in only a single text or small group of texts?</SPAN></FONT></FONT></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN style="COLOR: black"><FONT face="Times New Roman" color=#000000>It occurs to me; would it be possible to formulate some kind of measure of a word’s ‘overall key-ness’ in the set of texts we are studying? By multiplying together the word’s key score by the number of texts in which it is key, for example. Of course the resulting figure in this case would be totally arbitrary in a sense-even in the non-parametric realm of corpus comparison measurement it would not really ‘mean’ anything beyond its own description...</FONT></SPAN></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN style="COLOR: black"><FONT face="Times New Roman" color=#000000>However it seems to me useful to have some kind of quantitative means of describing a word’s significance across a range of texts in some way…</FONT></SPAN><SPAN style="COLOR: black"><FONT face="Times New Roman" color=#000000>Any ideas? <SPAN style="COLOR: black">I am a relative 'newbie' in this field, surely this issue has been tackled by somebody else somewhere?</SPAN><SPAN style="COLOR: black"> !</SPAN></FONT></SPAN></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN style="COLOR: black"><FONT face="Times New Roman" color=#000000><SPAN style="COLOR: black">All the best,</SPAN></FONT></SPAN></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN style="COLOR: black"><FONT face="Times New Roman" color=#000000><SPAN style="COLOR: black">Duncan Hunter</SPAN></P></FONT></SPAN><A href="http://valibel.fltr.ucl.ac.be/"></A></FONT></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>