Introduction to Lexical Similarity

This tutorial introduces lexical similarity analysis in R, covering string distance metrics, edit distance, and methods for comparing and clustering documents and words based on their surface forms. It is aimed at researchers in corpus linguistics, historical linguistics, and computational linguistics who need to quantify similarity between texts or lexical items. This tutorial is part of the Language Technology and Data Analysis Laboratory (LADAL), a free, open-access research infrastructure at the University of Queensland. LADAL provides tutorials, tools, and courses for researchers working with language data. All materials are freely available at https://ladal.edu.au and are part of the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA), funded by ARDC and NCRIS.