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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Hermann Moisl
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.
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
