Word Frequency Distributions: 18 (Text, Speech and Language Technology, 18) - Hardcover

Baayen, R. Harald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0792370171 ISBN 13: 9780792370178

Publisher: Springer, 2001

Synopsis

This book is an introduction to the statistical analysis of word frequency distributions, intended for linguists, psycholinguistics, and researchers work­ ing in the field of quantitative stylistics and anyone interested in quantitative aspects of lexical structure. Word frequency distributions are characterized by very large numbers of rare words. This property leads to strange statisti­ cal phenomena such as mean frequencies that systematically keep changing as the number of observations is increased, relative frequencies that even in large samples are not fully reliable estimators ofpopulationprobabilities, and model parameters that emerge as functions of the text size. Special statistical techniques for the analysis of distributions with large numbers of rare events can be found in various technical journals. The aim of this book is to make these techniques more accessible for non-specialists. Chapter 1 introduces some basic concepts and notation. Chapter 2 describes non-parametricmethods for the analysis ofword frequency distributions. The next chapterdescribes in detail three parametricmodels, the lognormal model, the Yule-Simon Zipfian model, and the generalized inverse Gauss-Poisson model. Chapter 4 introduces the concept of mixture distributions. Chapter 5 explores the effectofnon-randomness inword use on the accuracy of the non­ parametric and parametric models, all of which are based on the assumption that words occur independently and randomly in texts. Chapter 6 presents examples of applications.

About this title

Review

From the reviews:
"Baayen's book must surely in the future become the standard point of departure for statistical studies of vocabulary."
(Geoffrey Sampson (Computational Linguistics, 28:04)

Synopsis

This book is a comprehensive introduction to the statistical analysis of word frequency distributions, intended for computational linguists, corpus linguists, psycholinguists, and researchers in the field of quantitative stylistics. Word frequency distributions are characterized by very large numbers of rare words. This property leads to strange phenomena such as mean frequencies that systematically change as the number of observations is increased, relative frequencies that even in large samples are not fully reliable estimators of population probabilities, and model parameters that vary with text or corpus size.Special statistical techniques for the analysis of distributions with large numbers of rare events can be found in various technical journals. The aim of this book is to make these techniques more accessible for non-specialists, both theoretically, by means of a careful introduction to the underlying probabilistic and statistical concepts, and practically, by providing a program library implementing the main models for word frequency distributions.

Edition details

• Publisher: Springer
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0792370171
• ISBN 13: 9780792370178
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 357