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Lexical Frequency Profiles and Zipf's Law

2010· article· en· W1604751532 on OpenAlexaff
Roderick Edwards, Laura Collins

Bibliographic record

VenueLanguage Learning · 2010
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicNatural Language Processing Techniques
Canadian institutionsConcordia UniversityUniversity of Victoria
Fundersnot available
KeywordsZipf's lawVocabularyWord lists by frequencyNatural language processingArtificial intelligenceProbabilistic logicWord (group theory)Computer scienceHomogeneousLinguisticsPsychologyStatisticsCognitive psychologyStatistical physicsMathematicsSentence

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Laufer and Nation (1995) proposed that the Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP) can estimate the size of a second‐language writer's productive vocabulary. Meara (2005) questioned the sensitivity and the reliability of LFPs for estimating vocabulary sizes, based on the results obtained from probabilistic simulations of LFPs. However, the underlying mathematical model for the simulations, based on Zipf's law, allows such an analysis to be done directly, without recourse to simulations. The direct analysis has the further advantage of demonstrating how variability estimates obtained from within the 1k band (the 1,000 most frequent words of English) portion of written texts may explain the simulation results. The findings confirm that the ability of LFPs to distinguish between groups diminishes as vocabulary size increases. However, for fairly homogeneous groups, LFPs are able to provide a coarse but reasonable tool for vocabulary size estimation. We also explore modifications to Zipf's law that may result in a more accurate model of word frequencies in natural language.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.040
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.005
Threshold uncertainty score0.017

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.040
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0030.002
Science and technology studies0.0010.003
Scholarly communication0.0020.006
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0020.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0040.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.005
GPT teacher head0.256
Teacher spread0.251 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designSimulation or modeling
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations35
Published2010
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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