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Exploratory Multivariate Analysis

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Hermann Moisl

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Abstract

The proliferation of computational technology has generated an explosive production of electronically encoded information of all kinds. In the face of this, traditional paper-based methods for search and interpretation of data have been overwhelmed by sheer volume, and a variety of computational methods have been developed in an attempt to make the deluge tractable. These developments have clear implications for corpus linguistics. On the one hand, large electronic corpora potentially exploitable by the linguist are being generated as a by-product of the many kinds of daily IT-based activity worldwide, and, on the other, more and more application-specific electronic linguistic corpora are being constructed. Effective analysis of such corpora will increasingly be tractable only by adapting the interpretative methods developed by the statistical, computational linguistics, information retrieval, data mining, and related communities.The present chapter deals with one type of analytical tool: exploratory multivariate analysis. The discussion is in six main parts. The first part is the present introduction, the second explains what is meant by exploratory multivariate analysis, the third discusses the characteristics of data and the implications of these characteristics for generation and interpretation of analytical results, the fourth gives an overview of the various exploratory analytical methods currently available, the fifth reviews the application of exploratory multivariate analysis in corpus linguistics, and the sixth is a select bibliography.The material is presented in an intuitively accessible way, avoiding formalisms as much as possible. However, in order to work with multivariate analytical methods some background in mathematics and statistics is indispensable.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Moisl HL

Editor(s): Lüdeling, A; Kytö, M

Publication type: Book Chapter

Publication status: Published

Book Title: Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook

Year: 2009

Volume: 2

Pages: 874-898

Series Title: Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science; 29

Publisher: Mouton de Gruyter

Place Published: Berlin

Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item

ISBN: 9783110207330


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