1989/01/01 by Kenneth Church, Patrick Hanks · 11 citations
Computer Science · Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Rough Sets and Fuzzy Logic #Lexicography and Language Studies #Word (group theory) #Computer science #Linguistics #Variety (cybernetics) #Word Association #Association (psychology) #Meaning (existential) #Term (time) #Natural language processing #Word lists by frequency #Artificial intelligence #Psychology #Sentence
paper · pdf · doi:10.3115/981623.981633
openalex publication_date 1989/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
The term word assaciation is used in a very particular sense in the psycholinguistic literature. (Generally speaking, subjects respond quicker than normal to the word "nurse" if it follows a highly associated word such as "doctor.") We wilt extend the term to provide the basis for a statistical description of a variety of interesting linguistic phenomena, ranging from semantic relations of the doctor/nurse type (content word/content word) to lexico-syntactic co-occurrence constraints between verbs and prepositions (content word/function word). This paper will propose a new objective measure based on the information theoretic notion of mutual information, for estimating word association norms from computer readable corpora. (The standard method of obtaining word association norms, testing a few thousand subjects on a few hundred words, is both costly and unreliable.) The , proposed measure, the association ratio, estimates word association norms directly from computer readable corpora, waki,~g it possible to estimate norms for tens of thousands of words.