Computing Thresholds of Linguistic Saliency

We propose and test several computational methods to automatically determine possible saliency cut-off points in Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff and Tugwell, 2001). Sketch Engine currently displays collocations in descending importance, as well as according to grammatical relations. However, Sketch Engine does not provide suggestions for a cut-off point such that any items above this cut-off point may be considered significantly salient. This proposal suggests improvement to the present Sketch Engine interface by calculating three different cut-off point methods, so that the presentation of results can be made more meaningful to users. In addition, our findings also contribute to linguistic analyses based on empirical data.