You Can't Beat Frequency (Unless You Use Linguistic Knowledge) - A Qualitative Evaluation of Association Measures for Collocation and Term Extraction

Joachim Wermter, Udo Hahn

Abstract: In the past years, a number of lexical association measures have been studied to help extract new scientific terminology or general-language collocations. The implicit assumption of this research was that newly designed term measures involving more sophisticated statistical criteria would outperform simple counts of co-occurrence frequencies. We here explicitly test this assumption. By way of four qualitative criteria, we show that purely statistics-based measures reveal virtually no difference compared with frequency of occurrence counts, while linguistically more informed metrics do reveal such a marked difference.