Repetitiveterms

Repetitiveterms is a term used in linguistics and text processing to describe the repeated occurrence of the same lexical items or multiword expressions within a larger text or across a corpus. The repetitions may be deliberate, serving rhetorical emphasis or stylistic effect, or incidental, resulting from transcription errors, template-driven generation, or data collection artifacts.

In rhetoric, repetition devices like anaphora (repeating at the beginning of successive clauses) and epizeuxis (immediate repetition of a word or phrase) produce repetitiveterms in genres such as speeches or poetry. In computational contexts, repetitiveterms can skew statistics that assume lexical variety, and can bias models that weight term frequency, such as TF-IDF or topic models. High repetition can indicate emphasis or redundancy.

Detection and measurement: compute token frequency and repetition metrics; define a repetition score, e.g., the proportion of tokens that are repeated within a sliding window or the ratio of unique terms to total tokens; apply lexical normalization, stemming, lemmatization, and deduplication; identify artifact-induced repetitions via source metadata.

Applications and implications: in corpus linguistics, studying repetitiveterms helps characterize style and register; in data cleaning, removing unnecessary repetition reduces noise; in search and NLP, awareness of repetition informs scoring, summarization, and moderation.

See also: Pleonasm, Anaphora, Epizeuxis, Redundancy, Text normalization, Deduplication.