Finding Collocates and Multiword Units

The Latin maxim noscitur a soclis (one knows them by their associates) applies to words as well as people. Often we want to know not only how often a word form appears in a text, but also how frequently two or more specific word forms appear in proximity in a text. Words which appear near each other in a text more frequently than we would expect by chance are called collocates.

WordHoard allows you to analyze bigram (two word) collocates by selecting "Find Collocates" from the "Analysis" menu.

WordHoard also defines a multiword unit as a special type of collocate in which the component words comprise a meaningful phrase. For example, "King of England" is a meaningful multiword unit or phrase. WordHoard uses the notion of a pseudo-bigram to generalize the computation of bigram (two word) statistical measures to phrases longer than two words, and to allow comparisons of these measures for phrases with different word counts. WordHoard applies the LocalMaxs algorithm to the pseudo-bigram statistics to identify potentially interesting phrases that "stand out" in a text. Select "Find multiword units" from the "Analysis" menu to initiate a multiword unit analysis.

More details and examples for these two types of collocational analysis will be available shortly.