Collocation - Plain Text (TAPoRware)
This tool provides all words directly before and after a user-specified word, based on the desired context of words, lines, sentences or paragraphs. The results can be sorted alphabetically, by frequency, or by Z-score (an indication of how far and in what direction that item deviates from its distribution's mean, expressed in units of its distribution's standard deviation). HTML and XML versions are also available within the TAPoRware toolsets.
This tool’s functionality has been incorporated into Voyant available online at www.voyant-tools.org.
Documentation
Creator(s): Geoffrey Rockwell et. al.
Creator's Site: http://geoffreyrockwell.com/
Creator's Email: grockwel@ualberta.ca
Repository:
Attributes
- Type of analysis: Search Analysis Discovering
- Type of license: Free
- Web Usable: Run in Browser
- Ease of Use: Moderate
- Warning: No longer supported
- Tool Family: TAPoRware
- Historic Tool (developed before 2005): Discontinued (no longer available)
- TaDiRAH Methods: Discovering Other (analysis) Statistical Analysis
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Collocation (Plain Text) is a free, web-based tool designed to run in a browser window. It is easy to use, designed to provide a list of words surrounding a user-specified word or pattern (in this case, a regular expression) within a document, either hosted at a web address or uploaded from the user's files.
Users may set the context to words, lines, sentences or paragraphs and specify what length of that context to look within (ex: 5 words, 2 paragraphs). Searching a pattern rather than a word requires skill with regular expressions and is thus not accessible to all users.
Other features include an option to exclude words appearing in the Glasgow stop list from the list of collocates, output formats including XML Tree and tab delimited, plus the choice to sort collocates by frequency, alphabetically or by Z-score.
This tool has only two minor problems. When the tab delimited output is selected, the tool may not process some characters correctly; please see List Words (Plain Text) for examples. When counting unique words among the collocates, the tool includes blank spaces, some punctuation and words immediately following a single quote (ex: 'but); users are advised to adjust tool counts accordingly.
In summation, Collocation (Plain Text) is an effective way to determine all words surrounding a given word or pattern. Versions are also available for HTML and XML documents.