Dissertation Information for Keith C. Wright NAME: - Keith C. Wright
- (Alias) Kieth Carter Wright
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- Library and Information Science
SCHOOL:
- Columbia University (USA) (1972)
ADVISORS: - Maurice Tauber
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Jessica Lee Harris - Theodore C. Hines
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: Computer-assisted analysis of a large corpus of current educational report vocabulary
Abstract: This stuyd of present-day educational
research report vocabulary was conduscted in
the context of the ongoing research in
subject analysis and thesaurus construction
and maintenance at Columbia University
School of Library Service. It respresents an
effort to increase substantive information
about the linguistic aspects of indexings.
The test universe was in the social
sciences, but the conclusions seem generally
applicable.
First, the study summarises the state of the
art in automatic and computer-assisted
indexing concluding that language
complexities necessitate human decisions
both in indexing and indexing vocabulary
construction. The computer is seen as a
useful tool for counting, formatting, and
displaying indexing information.
next, the particular problems of social
science information handling are discussed.
The educational resouces Information Center
(ERIC) system is described and a critical
appraisal of that system in the areas of
decentralisatio, quality of information, and
indexing vocabulary/thesaurus structure is
presented.
The study examines the vocabulary of titles
and abstracts from a stratified sample of
300 report resumes taken from the ERIC TAPE
version of Research in Education between
November, 1966 and March , 1968. After the
removal of function words like articles,
pronouns, preporsitions and conjunctions,
25,325 word tokens remained representing
4,887 unique word types. The frequency ranks
of the sample were compared with the
frequency ranks of the same word types found
by Kucera and Francis [footnote] and with
the frequency ranks of word sample from
twelve of the ERIC clearninghouses.
While the general growth pattern of new word
types added to the vocabulary followed the
expected Zipf curves, two phenomena deserve
comment: (1) high frequency rank patterns
remained stable even when the number of
words processed was doubled, and (2) proper
nouns remained relatively stable in their
rate of occurence as increasing amounts of
text were processed.
Rank frequency comparisons among the word
samples showed (1) an expected similarity
between the overall educational research
sample and the general American English
sample, (2) an expected dissimilarity
between the education research sample and
the word samples of the tweleve
clearinghouses. These clearinghouse sample
were also dissimilar from the general
American English sample.
Words which occurred in the educational
research sample fifty or more times were
utilized as word pairs in a search of the
300 report resumes for word pair
coorcurrences. The expected number of
conccurrrences was not found that further
investigation of the concurrences was not
found that further investigation of the
conccurrence of multiword sets is suggested.
Word pairs which cooccurred five or more
times were found also to be actual indexing
terms utilized in the Thesaurus of ERIC
Descriptors and in Education Index. The
large naumber of word type pairs used as
parts of larger multiword headings and
structure is essential.
In the final section of the report the
results of the study are used to make
specific suggestions concerning the use of
coputer assisted text processing techniques
similar to those developed in this study as
a means bot of improving indexing in
information center operations. Specific
suggestions concerning the maintenance and
revision of the ERIC thesaurus are made.
Appendices include ranked and alphabetical
word lists, cooccurrence data, index use of
cooccurring word pairs, and copies of the
computer programs written by the author of
the study.
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MPACT Scores for Keith C. Wright A = 0
C = 1
A+C = 1
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-06-15 16:08:27
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