Word association norms, mutual information, and lexicography

Abstract

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.