[Corpora-List] Keyness across Texts

[Hunter, Duncan]

Hello Colleagues! 

 

A question about 'key-ness', and key words, in a group of texts...

 

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....

 

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. 

 

The key-ness value returned by such a procedure can be misleading because of the problem of dispersal; is the word '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?

 

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...

 

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...Any ideas?  I am a relative 'newbie' in this field, surely this issue has been tackled by somebody else somewhere? !

 

All the best,

 

Duncan Hunter

<http://valibel.fltr.ucl.ac.be/> 
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