Corpora: Negative mutual information?

[David Campbell]

Thank you to everyone that responded.  It seems the source of my confusion
was the distinction between 'mutual information' and 'pointwise mutual
information'.

David Campbell



> I have a question about calculating mutual information for bigrams in
> text.  According to every definition I've seen of MI, the values are
> non-negative.  However, I've found that for some bigrams made of common
> words in very uncommon bigrams, the value is less than zero.  Does anyone
> know how to interpret a negative mutual information?
>
> Thanks
> David Campbell

The Twelve Months

Snowy, Flowy, Blowy,
Showery, Flowery, Bowery,
Hoppy, Croppy, Droppy,
Breezy, Sneezy, Freezy.
GEORGE ELLIS