Computer measure of vocabulary? - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

braisler · 04-22-2005, 11:03 AM

Many of us have heard something along the lines of Shakespeare's vocabulary being estimated at 30,000 individual words. I have also heard that some under-educated children in the inner-city may have a functional vocabulary of less than 600 words. That got me to thinking about how that kind of calculation is done. I am wondering if there is some kind of program that will count the individual words in a documents, cull out the repetitions, and give you back a number of how many words are in a person's working vocabulary. Something like MS Word's "word count" feature with a tweak.

Could you create a long running document of every piece of original text that you have generated and run it through this program to give you a number? Maybe a word list could be generated that could be checked against dictionaries to correct for common names, alternative spellings, etc. Does anyone know of anything like this? Any linguists in the group? Besides cunning linguists? I did a few Google searches, but failed to find what I was looking for. Wrong search terms maybe.

I did find this tidbit on EFL (English as a foreign language) website...

Quote:

The fact that one needs to know fewer than 3,000 words in order to understand 80 percent of a reasonably representative modern English text does not mean that this kind of vocabulary could guarantee any of us complete cultural survival in a modern society. You need to realize that many of the most frequently occurring words in English are function words: articles, prepositions, and auxiliary verb forms such as those of "be, have," or "do." The article "the" is by far the most frequently used word in English, occurring 69,975 times in the one-million-word database.

Anybody else have any clues?

Zeraph · 04-22-2005, 12:54 PM

Well i found a chinese one...
I couldn't find a specific program, but I did find a lot of discussions on how to code it, if you don't know how to do that, there may be some key words there that will help you on your search.
http://www.programmingtalk.com/archi...p/t-14847.html
http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jsp...sageID=3211541
http://ww2.cs.fsu.edu/~steele/FALL_0.../project6.html
http://www.devhood.com/tutorials/tut...utorial_id=566
http://forums.devshed.com/archive/t-...s-in-file-java

Pip · 04-22-2005, 02:11 PM

A vocabulary of just 600 words? Whoa. That's not much better than "point and grunt". Come to think of it, that's probably how big my active German vocabulary is these days... Anyway, you might want to check out Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary, or at least the foreword. They go through staggering amounts of written English to sort out what words are mostly used, and how they are used.

On a side note, a while ago I found a webpage where you could submit a piece of your writing and it would guess your gender based on what words and wordings you used. Very amusing, I wish I could find it again.

04-22-2005, 12:54 PM	#2 (permalink)
Zeraph Banned Location: The Cosmos	Well i found a chinese one... I couldn't find a specific program, but I did find a lot of discussions on how to code it, if you don't know how to do that, there may be some key words there that will help you on your search. http://www.programmingtalk.com/archi...p/t-14847.html http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jsp...sageID=3211541 http://ww2.cs.fsu.edu/~steele/FALL_0.../project6.html http://www.devhood.com/tutorials/tut...utorial_id=566 http://forums.devshed.com/archive/t-...s-in-file-java

04-22-2005, 02:11 PM	#3 (permalink)
Pip Likes Hats Location: Stockholm, Sweden	A vocabulary of just 600 words? Whoa. That's not much better than "point and grunt". Come to think of it, that's probably how big my active German vocabulary is these days... Anyway, you might want to check out Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary, or at least the foreword. They go through staggering amounts of written English to sort out what words are mostly used, and how they are used. On a side note, a while ago I found a webpage where you could submit a piece of your writing and it would guess your gender based on what words and wordings you used. Very amusing, I wish I could find it again.