Discovering Term Occurrence Structure in Text

This article examines some consequences for information control of the tendency of occurrences of contentbearing terms to appear together, or clump. Properties of previously defined clumping measures are reviewed and extended, and the significance of these measures for devising retrieval strategies discussed. A new type of clumping measure, which extends the earlier measures by permitting gaps within a clump, is defined, and several variants examined. Experiments are carried out that indicate the relation between the new measure and one of the earlier measures, as well as the ability of the two types of measure to predict compression efficiency.