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An Alternative to Juilland's Usage Coefficient for Lexical Frequencies NICHD

Author(s):
Carroll, John B.
Publication Year:
1970
Report Number:
RB-70-48
Source:
ETS Research Bulletin
Document Type:
Report
Page Count:
17
Subject/Key Words:
National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), Computer Software, Data Analysis, Juilland, A., Statistical Analysis, Word Frequency

Abstract

A new word usage coefficient, Um, is proposed. It avoids the disadvantages of Juilland's U by (1) taking account of unequally-sized categories, (2) using a superior measure of the dispersion of frequencies over categories, (3) not permitting Um to be smaller than a certain minimum value greater than zero, even when all occurrences are concentrated in a single category, and (4) scaling the coefficient in terms of a corpus of a "standard million" tokens. Computations are given for illustrative data and discussed.

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