The point of it...

The idea is to find out how strongly each collocate relates to the search-word near which it was found. MI (or other relevant statistic) is not computed by default for a collocate list.

 

How to compute it

In the Concord menu, choose Compute | Relationships:

 

 

Steps

1.Suppose you have made a concordance using all the files in Documents\wsmith6\text\shakespeare and have done a concordance on love. You see collocates such as Romeo, hate, the, Juliet, Nurse etc. All these show a "Relation" score of "??" because they haven't yet been computed.

2.If you haven't done so yet, use WordList to make a word list of the same text files (or if you prefer, use some other reference corpus). Make sure the reference corpus file is what you prefer.

3.Now choose the menu item and Concord will use the reference corpus filename. It will look up each of your collocates in the word list and compute MI using the information in the reference corpus word list.

You can choose a different statistic in the main Controller Concord settings.

 

Note: the procedure goes through your collocates and tries to find each in the word-list. If absent, you get a blank result. If one of your search-terms has a space in it such as Friar Lawrence, an ordinary single-word word list won't know its frequency and you will be asked to supply it. If you don't know, you should compute a concordance on that search-phrase over the same corpus first.

 

 

Full lemma processing, case sensitive

These are only relevant if your word list has any lemmatised entries, or it is a case-sensitive word list and you wish processing to respect case-sensitivity.  

 

Relation statistic

Choose which type of relation you wish to compute. The default is Specific Mutual Information but in the screenshot Z score has been chosen.

 

 

Column for relation

The default is "Total". If you choose Total you're computing the relationship across the current collocation horizons set.

If you prefer to examine the relationship at only one position instead, you may:

 

 

See also: Collocation, Collocate display, Mutual Information