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Article In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics: Online-First Articles

Sensitivity of dispersion measures to distributional patterns and corpus design

ORCiD logo with link | University of Bamberg
ORCiD logo with link | University of Northern Arizona
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Abstract
Recent work has shown that dispersion measures respond to multiple features in the data: Juilland’s D varies systematically with the number of corpus parts, and all commonly used indices are affected by the frequency of an item. This study uses a simulation approach to provide further insights into the sensitivity of dispersion measures to differences in corpus design (number of texts, average text length, distribution of text lengths) and distributional milieu (frequency and evenness of distribution). Our results suggest that, within the settings covered by our analysis, the factors frequency and evenness of distribution have roughly the same impact, though there is some variation among measures. The average text length emerges as another feature that leaves its mark on the observed scores. Finally, we note that D2 exhibits the same weakness as D — it varies with the number of corpus parts that enter the analysis.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Measuring dispersion: Indices and their limitations
    • 2.1Dispersion measures
    • 2.2Unit of analysis
    • 2.3Fragility of measures: Previous work
  • 3.Extensions of prior work: Scope of the present study
    • 3.1Average text length
    • 3.2Distribution of text lengths
    • 3.3Factors considered in the present study
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1Simulation study: General procedure
    • 4.2Distributional parameters: Negative binomial model
    • 4.3Transformation of dispersion scores
    • 4.4Analysis of simulation results
  • 5.Results
  • 6.Summary of findings and implications
  • 7.Outlook
  • Notes
  • References
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