A Quantitative Analysis of Word-Definition in a Machine-Readable Dictionary
Robert W. P. Luk, Venus M.K. Chan · Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · 1995
This paper investigates some of the distributional properties of word definitions in a machinereadable dictionary which • was obtained from the Oxford Text Archive.Three types of distributions were examined: (1) frequency-ranked distribution of words in the definitions, (2) the length distribution of word definitions and (3) the frequency distribution of the number of unique tags of an entry.In addition, the coverage characteristics of headwords over word definitions are also explored.A rough-and-ready comparison of distributional properties between tokens and their morphologically decomposed ones are made.Our result shows that morphological dcomposition does not change the length distribution of the word definitions nor the ranked-frequency distribution of words, significantly.However, it increases the coverage of word definitions dramatically compared with no decompositions.Furthermore, the frequency distribution of the number of unique tags per entry is approximately linear when the data is suitablely scaled (i.e.linear or logarithmic).