An extended TF-IDF method for improving keyword extraction in traditional corpus-based research: An example of a climate change corpus

Keyword extraction involves the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms or models developed in the realm of text mining. Keyword extraction is a common technique used to explore linguistic patterns in the corpus linguistic field, and Dunning’s Log-Likelihood Test (LLT) has long been integrated into corpus software as a statistic-based NLP model. While prior research has confirmed the widespread applicability of keyword extraction in corpus-based research, LLT has certain limitations that may impact the accuracy of keyword extraction in such research. This paper summarized the limitations of LLT, which include benchmark corpus interference, elimination of grammatical and generic words, consideration of sub-corpus relevance, flexibility in feature selection, and adaptability to different research goals. To address these limitations, this paper proposed an extended Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) method. To verify the applicability of the proposed method, 20 highly cited research articles on climate change from the Web of Science (WOS) database were used as the target corpus, and a comparison was conducted with the traditional method. The experimental results indicated that the proposed method could effectively overcome the limitations of the traditional method and demonstrated the feasibility and practicality of incorporating the TF-IDF algorithm into relevant corpus-based research.