Word frequency
The word frequency ( word frequency ) is a statistical quantity that indicates how often a certain word occurs in a text or text corpus. It can be given as an absolute number or in relation to the total number of words in the text. The frequency distribution of the words depends on the language , the type and the subject of the examined text. The word frequency is represented in frequency dictionaries for the vocabulary of a language or of texts.
Law of word frequencies
If the words are put together for a text or text corpus, sorted according to their frequency, then a ranking frequency distribution applies for this combination , the simplest form of which is Zipf's law . Because of problems with the most common and rarest words in the application of this law, a number of other proposals have been developed. Above all, it is important that the word frequencies follow certain laws. For the vocabulary of Goethe's Erlkönig , Altmann & Altmann have shown that the so-called Zipf-Mandelbrot distribution is a good model; the same can be demonstrated for a text from the Sudel books by Lichtenberg. These rank frequency distributions are among the best-known and oldest achievements in quantitative linguistics .
application areas
See also
Web links
- wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de/html/wliste.html - The 10 (100, 1000, 10000) most common words in German, Dutch, English and French.
- wortschatz.informatik.uni-leipzig.de - Vocabulary dictionary of the University of Leipzig based on German sources with an indication of the frequency class.
- [1] - corpus-based word frequency lists in German, French, Italian and English.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Vivien Altmann, Gabriel Altmann: Instructions for quantitative text analysis. Methods and Applications. RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2008, pp. 86–89. ISBN 978-3-9802659-5-9 .
- ^ Karl-Heinz Best : Quantitative Linguistics. An approximation. 3rd strongly revised and expanded edition. Peust & Gutschmidt, Göttingen 2006, pp. 77-80. ISBN 3-933043-17-4 .