Methods for the qualitative evaluation of lexical association measures

Abstract

This paper presents methods for a qualitative, unbiased comparison of lexical association measures and the results we have obtained for adjective-noun pairs and preposition-noun-verb triples extracted from German corpora. In our approach, we compare the entire list of candidates, sorted according to the particular measures, to a reference set of manually identified "true positives". We also show how estimates for the very large number of hapaxlegomena and double occurrences can be inferred from random samples.