WordSmith Tools KeyWords

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WordSmith Tools KeyWords

• ???
• frank_at_liang.com.cn

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• What are keywords?
• Positive and negative keywords
• Using KeyWords analysis in......
• How?
• Keyness and p value
• Practice

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What are keywords?

• A keyword is a word whose relative frequency in
  an observed corpus is unusually higher or lower
  than that in a reference corpus.

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Positive and negative keywords

• Positive keywords are words which are unusually
  more frequent than they are in a reference
  corpus.
• In legal documents, for example, words like act,
  article, penalty, delinquency, etc. are much more
  frequent than they are in a general corpus.

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Positive and negative keywords

• In a corpus of texts written by corpus linguists,
  words like type, token, corpus, frequency,
  concordance, etc. would be much more frequent
  than they are in a general corpus.
• In medical texts
• In zoological texts

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Positive and negative keywords

• Negative keywords are words which are much less
  frequent than they are in a reference corpus.
• Often used to determined which words are
  underused.

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Using KeyWords analysis

• In lexicography
• In content analysis and text classification
• In SLA

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How?

• In order to make a KeyWords analysis with
  Wordsmith Tools, two wordlists are needed.
• Wordlists show the frequency profiles of words in
  a corpus.

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Keyness and p value

• Keyness and p value indicate the extent to which
  a word in an observed corpus is more or less
  frequent than it is in a general corpus.

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• Now, is the overused or underused in Chinese
  EFL learners texts?
• Which other words are underused in Chinese EFL
  learners texts?

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100100 thanks!

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Example