Co-Dispersion: A Windowless Approach to Lexical Association

We introduce an alternative approach to extracting word pair associations from corpora, based purely on surface distances in the text. We contrast it with the prevailing windowbased co-occurrence model and show it to be more statistically robust and to disclose a broader selection of significant associative relationships owing largely to the property of scale-independence. In the process we provide insights into the limiting characteristics of window-based methods which complement the sometimes conflicting application-oriented literature in this area.