Precision and recall are discussed in Section 4.1.2 of “Corpus Linguistics: A Guide to the Methodology” (CLGM) (p. 111–116). Frequently, students seem to have more difficulties than I would have expected in understanding these concepts, so I looked around to see how other people have explained it. Frequently, a fishing metaphor is used, which I quite like, as it has a potential to explain many other aspects of corpus linguistics. So I decided to write my own version of such a metaphorical explanation, which I may or may not include in a future edition of CLGM. Continue reading →