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<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=517153912-09072007><FONT color=#000080>Dear
Duncan, </FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=517153912-09072007><FONT
color=#000080></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=517153912-09072007><FONT color=#000080>You
may want to check Mike Scott's and Christopher Tribble's book <EM>Textual
Patterns</EM> (Benjamins, 2006, browsable at <A
href="http://site.ebrary.com/pub/benjamins/Doc?isbn=9789027222930">http://site.ebrary.com/pub/benjamins/Doc?isbn=9789027222930</A>)
which contains some very useful chapters on keyness and aboutness (chs. 4 and 5
if I remember correctly) and discusses different ways of identifying keywords in
texts and corpora, and of interpreting the search output. </FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=517153912-09072007><FONT
color=#000080></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=517153912-09072007><FONT color=#000080>Best
wishes... Ute</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV dir=ltr align=left><SPAN class=517153912-09072007><FONT
color=#000080></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000080></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV
align=left>************************************************************</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Dr. Ute Römer<BR>English Department<BR>Leibniz University of
Hanover<BR>Königsworther Platz 1<BR>30167 Hannover<BR>Germany</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Phone: +49 (0)511 762 2997<BR>Fax: +49 (0)511 762 2996<BR>Please note NEW
e-mail address: <A title=mailto:ute.roemer@engsem.uni-hannover.de
href="blocked::mailto:ute.roemer@engsem.uni-hannover.de">ute.roemer@engsem.uni-hannover.de</A><BR><A
title=http://www.uteroemer.com/
href="blocked::http://www.uteroemer.com/">http://www.uteroemer.com</A><BR><A
href="blocked::http://www.engsem.uni-hannover.de/angli/">http://www.engsem.uni-hannover.de/angli/</A><BR></DIV></DIV><BR>
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<FONT face=Tahoma size=2><B>From:</B> owner-corpora@lists.uib.no
[mailto:owner-corpora@lists.uib.no] <B>On Behalf Of </B>Hunter,
Duncan<BR><B>Sent:</B> Monday, July 09, 2007 2:30 PM<BR><B>To:</B>
corpora@uib.no<BR><B>Subject:</B> [Corpora-List] Keyness across
Texts<BR></FONT><BR></DIV>
<DIV></DIV>
<DIV id=idOWAReplyText50502 dir=ltr>
<DIV dir=ltr><FONT color=#0000ff>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
color=#000000>Hello Colleagues! </FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
color=#000000></FONT> </P>
<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>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN><FONT
face="Times New Roman" color=#000000></FONT></SPAN> </P>
<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>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"> </P>
<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>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
color=#000000></FONT> </P>
<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>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN
style="COLOR: black"><FONT face="Times New Roman"
color=#000000></FONT></SPAN> </P>
<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>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN
style="COLOR: black"></SPAN> </P>
<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>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN
style="COLOR: black"><FONT face="Times New Roman" color=#000000><SPAN
style="COLOR: black"></SPAN></FONT></SPAN> </P>
<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>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt"><SPAN
style="COLOR: black"><FONT face="Times New Roman" color=#000000><SPAN
style="COLOR: black"></SPAN></FONT></SPAN> </P>
<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></BLOCKQUOTE></BODY></HTML>