Praxiling and the CORLI consortium are pleased to announce the conference "Untangling Associations - Advances in collocation and keyword analysis", which will take place on Friday 22 September 2023 at Paul-Valéry University Montpellier and online. Detailed information regarding the conference's description and program can be found below.

Conference description

For the past few decades, assessing the adequacy of association measures (AM) – be it in the domain of keywords, collocations or collostructional analysis – has been one of the most important strands of corpus linguistic research. Most of the work in this area focussed on finding the one best measure as a trade off between statistical appropriateness and ease of computational implementation, thus reflecting the practice of corpus linguists predominantly favouring data sets based on one single AM for the sake of simplicity. This one-AM-fits-all approach, however, suffers from the fact that the most consensual and widespread AMs, such as log-likelihood ratio (G2), conflate different strands of information (viz. frequency and strength of attraction), whereas data sets used to investigate association phenomena (keywords of target corpora as well as lexical or lexico-grammatical cooccurrence) should be designed to integrate several distinct dimensions, as has been recently pointed out by Stefan Th. Gries (2019, 2021). Starting from Gries’s proposal of the approach called « tupleization », this conference will be the occasion to discuss the present state of the art and possible innovations within the realm of methodological frameworks and studies encompassing keyword, collocation or collostruction analysis. It gathers scholars from different areas of research ranging from corpus linguistics and NLP to Digital Humanities and Textometrics as practised in the French tradition of Discourse Analysis.

The conference will be held on Friday 22 September 2023 at Paul-Valéry University Montpellier (campus Saint-Charles 2, Salle des Actes 009) and online via Zoom (access link: https://univ-montp3-fr.zoom.us/j/95367941544). Attendance is free of charge.

References Gries, Stefan Th. (2019). 15 years of collostructions: Some long overdue additions/corrections (to/of actually all sorts of corpus-linguistics measures). International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 24 (3), 385–412. Gries, Stefan Th. (2021). A new approach to (key) keywords analysis: Using frequency, and now also dispersion. Research in Corpus Linguistics 9 (2), 1–33.

Program

10:00 - 11:00 Stefan Th. Gries: Tupleization in corpus linguistics: how and why 11:05 - 11:45 Martin Hilpert: Why are grammatical elements more evenly dispersed than lexical elements? A reanalysis with a new dispersion measure 11:45 - 12:25 Ludovic Lebart: Dealing with low frequencies or high discrepancies of lexical frequencies: How to adapt the tools of textual data analysis to corpora of poems and lyrics 12:30 - 14:15 Lunch 14:20 - 15:00 Bénédicte Pincemin: The Specificity Measure in Textometry: a Hermeneutic Use of the Fisher's Exact Test 15:00 - 15:40 Christof Schöch: Evaluating Measures of Keyness: A Perspective from Computational Literary Studies 15:40 - 16:20 Ludovic Tanguy & Filip Miletic: Measuring semantic specificities across corpora: looking for semantic shifts in Quebec English 16:20 - 17:00 Coffee break 17:00 - 18:00 Panel discussion

Contact : Sascha Diwersy (sascha.diwersy@univ-montp3.fr) and Céline Poudat (celine.poudat@univ-cotedazur.fr)