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Theory, Research and Practice

Table 1 Small scale example of the co-occurrence matrix in which each cell represents the co-occurrence frequency of the 5-gram based on 6 single words from 2 contexts: sun is shining outside, sun is warm and yellow

From: Agentic, communal, and spiritual traits are related to the semantic representation of written narratives of positive and negative life events

 

Sun

Is

Shining

Outside

Warm

Yellow

Sun

0

2

1

1

1

1

Is

2

0

1

1

1

1

Shining

1

1

0

1

0

0

Outside

1

1

1

0

0

0

Warm

1

1

0

0

0

1

Yellow

1

1

0

0

1

0

  1. In application of latent semantic analysis in computational linguistic, typically highly frequent words that do not contain any semantic information are omitted (e.g., “we” and “in”). However, our focus is to apply latent semantic analysis in personality and social psychology, where for example pronouns carry highly important information. Therefore, we have chosen to keep all these words, although they may to a minor extent influence the quality of the semantic representation for other words negatively