segment.optimizer: A function to optimize MSTTR segment sizes

In unDocUMeantIt/koRpus: Text Analysis with Emphasis on POS Tagging, Readability, and Lexical Diversity

Description

This function calculates an optimized segment size for MSTTR.

Usage

segment.optimizer(txtlgth, segment = 100, range = 20, favour.min = TRUE)

Arguments

txtlgth	Integer value, size of text in tokens.
segment	Integer value, start value of the segment size.
range	Integer value, range around segment to search for better fitting sizes.
favour.min	Logical, whether as a last ressort smaller or larger segment sizes should be prefered, if in doubt.

Details

When calculating the mean segmental type-token ratio (MSTTR), tokens are divided into segments of a given size and analyzed. If at the end text is left over which won't fill another full segment, it is discarded, i.e. information is lost. For interpretation it is debatable which is worse: Dropping more or less actual token material, or variance in segment size between analyzed texts. If you'd prefer the latter, this function might prove helpful.

Starting with a given text length, segment size and range to investigate, segment.optimizer iterates through possible segment values. It returns the segment size which would drop the fewest tokens (zero, if you're lucky). Should more than one value fulfill this demand, the one nearest to the segment start value is taken. In cases, where still two values are equally far away from the start value, it depends on the setting of favour.min if the smaller or larger segment size is returned.

Value

A numeric vector with two elements:

seg	The optimized segment size
drop	The number of tokens that would be dropped using this segment size

See Also

lex.div, MSTTR

Examples

segment.optimizer(2014, favour.min=FALSE)

unDocUMeantIt/koRpus documentation built on May 21, 2021, 9:26 p.m.