[Corpora-List] Comparing learner frequencies with native frequencies

From: Dominic Glennon (dglennon@cambridge.org)
Date: Mon Mar 06 2006 - 12:09:20 MET

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    Dear corporistas,

    I'm trying to compare word frequencies in our native speaker corpus and
    our learner corpus. Having normalised the frequencies in both corpora to
    frequencies per 10 million words, a simple subtraction still heavily skews
    the results towards high-frequency words. I've tried taking the log of
    both normalised frequencies before subtracting to get around the Zipfian
    nature of word frequency distribution - this gives better results, but is
    it well-motivated? I'd be grateful for any help you could give me, or any
    pointers to previous work done in this area. Many thanks,

    Dom

    Dominic Glennon
    Systems Manager
    Cambridge University Press
    01223 325595

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