xcit'ed

Kenneth Ward Church, Patrick Hanks Word Association Norms, Mutual Information, and Lexicography Computational Linguistics 16(1): 22-9. 1990.

The term word association is used in a very particular sense in the p!ycholinguistic literature. (Generally speaking, subjects respond quicker than normal to the word "nurse" if it follows a highly associated word such as "doctor.") We will extend the term to provide the basis for a statistical description of a variety of interesting linguistic phenomena, ranging from semantic rehtions of the doctor/nurse type (content word/content word) to lexico-syntactlc co-occurrence constraints between

[mutual information][proximity word]

Smaller window sizes will identify fixed expressions (idioms) and other relations that hold over short ranges; larger window sizes will highlight semantic concepts and other relationships that hold over larger scales. (asymmetry) f(x, y) \neq f(y, x) because f(x, y) encodes linear precedence.