Word Association Norms, Mutual Information, and Lexicography

9 Conclusions

1. What is “triangulation” in lexicography?
   Although a concordance is indexed by one word, lexicographers use a second word (like from) or a common semantic concept to categorize lines, clustering them into senses by usage (distributional evidence) rather than intuitive meaning.
   • Church & Hanks, 1990, Word Association Norms, Mutual Information, and Lexicography (Computational Linguistics), §9, p. 28
2. What are the limitations of the association ratio according to its authors?
   It uses only distributional evidence (it favours set … for over set … down, not knowing the former is compositional); it’s superficial, unable to cluster words into syntactic classes without a tagger or parser; and neither preprocess reveals similarities like picture/photograph.
   • Church & Hanks, 1990, Word Association Norms, Mutual Information, and Lexicography (Computational Linguistics), §9, pp. 28–29
3. How did Church and Hanks see the role of the association ratio for lexicographers?
   As an important tool, rather like an index to the concordances: it helps decide what to look for and gives a quick summary of “what company our words do keep”.
   • Church & Hanks, 1990, Word Association Norms, Mutual Information, and Lexicography (Computational Linguistics), §9, p. 29