Co-occurrence

In linguistics, co-occurrence or cooccurrence is an above-chance frequency of occurrence of two terms (also known as coincidence or concurrence) from a text corpus alongside each other in a certain order. Co-occurrence in this linguistic sense can be interpreted as an indicator of semantic proximity or an idiomatic expression. Corpus linguistics and its statistic analyses reveal patterns of co-occurrences within a language and enable to work out typical collocations for its lexical items. A co-occurrence restriction is identified when linguistic elements never occur together. Analysis of these restrictions can lead to discoveries about the structure and development of a language.[1]

Co-occurrence can be seen an extension of word counting in higher dimensions. Co-occurrence can be quantitatively described using measures like correlation or mutual information.

See also

• Distributional hypothesis
• Statistical semantics
• Co-occurrence matrix
• Co-occurrence networks
• Similarity measure[2]
  • Dice coefficient

References

1. Kroeger, Paul (2005). Analyzing Grammar: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 20. ISBN 978-0-521-01653-7.
2. Bordag, Stefan. "A Comparison of Co-occurrence and Similarity Measures as Simulations of Context". CiteSeerX 10.1.1.471.5863. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)