Match stimuli across conditions on several lexical dimensions

The first condition is the anchor; its items are chosen by an even spread across the sorted candidate subpool. Every other condition is then matched to the anchor item by item, on the match_on dimensions, using standardised Euclidean distance under a tolerance window derived from the anchor.

Usage

match_stimuli(pool, design, schema, verbose = FALSE)

Arguments

pool: A lexicon/pool with all match_on dimensions present (see add_neighbourhood()).
design: A parsed design configuration (conditions, match_on, n_per_condition/n_per_cell). match_on must name at least one dimension, and the number of items is a whole number of at least 1, 20 when neither key is given.
schema: The parsed global schema (tolerances live here).
verbose: Logical; report tolerance relaxations and a shrunk anchor.

Value

A data frame of selected stimuli with a condition label and a set index pairing matched items across conditions.

Details

Two policies govern degraded selections, each read from the design's matching block with the schema as fallback: shortfall ("error", the default, refuses to return fewer sets than requested; "allow" accepts the shrink) and on_insufficient_tolerance ("relax", the default, widens an undersupplied tolerance window to the full condition subpool and records the relaxation in an "audit" attribute; "error" refuses instead).

A candidate missing any match_on dimension cannot be scored, so every method excludes it before selecting, and the number excluded per condition is recorded in the "audit" attribute's incomplete_dropped entry. The shortfall policy then applies to what remains, and a condition left with no complete candidate is refused.

tie_break, read in the same way, decides between candidates at exactly the same rounded distance, which integer dimensions make common: "hash", the default, prefers the smaller SHA-256 of lexsync-tie-v1| followed by the word, which favours no part of the alphabet, and "bytes" prefers the spelling that sorts first and reproduces lexsync 0.1. The rule also orders the tied pairs of joint and optimal and the tied rows at their candidate cap. The anchor's even spread keeps its byte-order tie-break under both rules.