ald: Compute average Levenshtein distances

In vwr: Useful functions for visual word recognition research

Description

Compute the average Levenshtein distances between a word and its n nearest neighbors in a lexicon.

Usage

ald(sources, targets, n, method="levenshtein", parallel = FALSE)
old20(sources, targets, method="levenshtein", parallel = FALSE)

Arguments

sources	a list of words for which the average Levenshtein distance should be computed. Must be of type character, or convertible to type character with as.character.
targets	a list of words containing possible neighbors. Must be of type character, or convertible to type character with as.character.
method	specifies the distance function. With "levenshtein", levenshtein.distance is used, with "levenshtein.damerau" levenshtein.damerau is used.
n	specifies the number of nearest neighbors on which the average should be based. The variant old20 does not take the n argument (it is fixed to 20).
parallel	with parallel=TRUE, ald will run in parallel an multiple cores. The number of parallel processes is specified by detectCores(logical = FALSE).

Details

The OLD20 measure was originally proposed by Yarkoni et al. (2008). This implementation is orders of magnitude faster than Tal Yarkoni's LDcalc program (see http://talyarkoni.com/materials.php). Do not use multicore=TRUE in a GUI environment, as it will most likely crash your R session.

Value

A vector of average Levenshtein distances with names corresponding to sources.

Author(s)

Emmanuel Keuleers

References

Yarkoni, T., Balota, D., & Yap, M. (2008). Moving beyond Coltheart’s N: A new measure of orthographic similarity. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15(5), 971–979.

See Also

levenshtein.distance, levenshtein.neighbors

Examples

data(basque.words)
ald(basque.words[1:10],basque.words,20)
old20(basque.words[1:10],basque.words)

Example output

Loading required package: stringdist
Loading required package: lattice
Loading required package: latticeExtra
Loading required package: RColorBrewer
       aba      abade    abadesa   abadetza    abagune     abaila    abaildu 
      1.45       2.00       2.90       3.10       2.75       1.95       2.40 
     abako abandonatu   abandonu 
      1.85       3.85       3.70 
       aba      abade    abadesa   abadetza    abagune     abaila    abaildu 
      1.45       2.00       2.90       3.10       2.75       1.95       2.40 
     abako abandonatu   abandonu 
      1.85       3.85       3.70 

vwr documentation built on May 2, 2019, 4:23 a.m.