[Corpora-List] Keyness across Texts

[Ute Römer]

Dear Duncan, 
 
You may want to check Mike Scott's and Christopher Tribble's book Textual
Patterns (Benjamins, 2006, browsable at
http://site.ebrary.com/pub/benjamins/Doc?isbn=9789027222930) 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. 
 
Best wishes... Ute
 
 
************************************************************
 
Dr. Ute Römer
English Department
Leibniz University of Hanover
Königsworther Platz 1
30167 Hannover
Germany
 
Phone: +49 (0)511 762 2997
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Please note NEW e-mail address: ute.roemer at engsem.uni-hannover.de
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  _____  

From: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no [mailto:owner-corpora at lists.uib.no] On
Behalf Of Hunter, Duncan
Sent: Monday, July 09, 2007 2:30 PM
To: corpora at uib.no
Subject: [Corpora-List] Keyness across Texts


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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