“You shall know a word by the company it keeps” (Firth, J. R. 1957: 11)
Methods to analyse collocations / cooccurrences are based on an evaluation of the statistical significance of the occurrence of a term in the context of a node.
The statistical identification of cooccurrences highlights language patterns that deserve attention. Statements about meaning require that the quantitative analysis of text is combined with qualitative methods, i.e. an inspection of concordances.
The following examples are based on the UNGA-corpus.
library(polmineR) use("UNGA")