Re: word frequency lists?

Henry Kucera (HENRY@BROWNVM.brown.edu)
Thu, 30 Nov 95 09:35:59 EST

>Posted on 27 Nov 1995 at 06:14:18 by Alex Chengyu Fang
>
>I've been following the discussion but no one seemed to have mentioned John
>Carroll's work in the American Heritage Intermediate Dictionary Corpus. His
>rank order list was made not according to the absolute or average frequency,
>but an value adjusted by the distribution index which reflects the
>cross-category distribution of a particular lexical item. Unevenly
>distributed words were adjusted down in the list.
>
With all obligatory modesty, let me point out that the 1982 book on the Brown
corpus "Frequency Analysis of English Usage" by Francis and Kucera presents
frequency rankings both by actual and adjusted frequency. Morever, it contains
a discussionn of various proposals for calculating adjusted frequency and our
arguments why we selected the measure we use.

Henry Kucera