Frequency list
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In computational linguistics, a frequency list is a sorted list of words (word types) together with their frequency, where frequency here usually means the number of occurrences in a given corpus. A short example could be:
| the | 3789654 |
| he | 2098762 |
| [...] | |
| king | 57897 |
| boy | 56975 |
| [...] | |
| outragious | 76 |
| [...] | |
| stringyfy | 5 |
| [...] | |
| transducionalify | 1 |
It seems that Zipf's law holds for frequency lists drawn from longer texts of any natural language. Frequency lists are a necessary prerequisite for building of an electronic dictionary, which is by itself a prerequisite for a wide range of applications in computational linguistics.
German linguists define the häufigkeitsklasse (frequency class) of an item in the list using the base 2 logarithm of the ratio between its frequency and the frequency of the most frequent item. The most common item belongs to frequency class 0 (zero) and any item that is half as frequent belongs in class 1. In the example list above, the misspelled word outragious has a ratio of 76/3789654 and belongs in class 16.
