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Experimenting with French word frequency | ||
Tags: Word Frequency | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5436 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 49 of 55 07 September 2014 at 8:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
Let's visit this debate one more time. We see the results of the typical study of vocabulary coverage for a variety of datasets. The results are exactly what has been observed for all such studies across all languages. Because of the very nature of the sampling methodology, we observe that to get high coverage across all the samples you need progressively larger and larger vocabularies. Nothing new. One of the conclusions is that "you need over a thousand nouns to get any kind of reasonable coverage." All this is very true, and French is no different from the other languages. The conclusion is that with less than 1,000 nouns, you have the situation described above. "If you don't have "train" or "station" or "ticket", for example, you're going to a really vague and awkward conversation." This is certainly true. I agree. Suppose we're not interested in buying a train ticket. Suppose we're interested in talking about life in a lycée militaire in France. By coincidence, we have a conversation between two native-speakers right here in an earlier post. This conversation takes exactly 94 nouns. It's not about trains of course. Let's say we wanted to have a conversation about taking the train from Paris to Marseille, how many nouns would be necessary for that? It all depends on the length of the conversation and the detail. Let's take the same two speakers from the previous conversation speaking for the same duration. There's a good chance that we would get approximately the same number of nouns. emk's position is totally coherent and valid. If you take 1,000 nouns and try to talk about all the possible subjects under the sun in French, there is a good chance, you'll miss some words. Maybe you want to talk about the Grand cru wines of Bordeaux, you'll miss some important words. Maybe you want to talk about the history of foie gras in southwest France. Or maybe the construction of French naval vessels in the 18th century. You'll be missing a ton of words. If you want to combine all three domains, you will need three sets of terms. The more domains you add, the more terms you need. This is a given. We all know this. But do all people in France need to be able to talk about the history of foie gras, the Bordeaux Grands crus and 18th century French naval architecture?. No. None of those interest me. I want to talk about the lycée militaire. Then I only need 94 nouns. If you take vocabulary set of 94 nouns of this conversation at compare it to the emk's database, you will probably get a very low coverage. Let's say around 40%. What does this prove? That this conversation is not real? That the people having the conversation can't understand each other? I'll let people draw the conclusions they want. That pretty much sums up the debate. The number of nouns you need depends on the domains you will be talking about. You can have a conversation about one domain or 100 domains or more. You then choose the vocabulary necessary. There's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all 300-word set. What is very interesting in the statistics emk provides is the coverage of verbs. Verbs are interesting to count because they are a very stable category. Again, for teachers of French, there is nothing surprising in these figures. French has around 13,000 verbs. We see that 2149 verbs or around 20% of all verbs provide 99.5% coverage. The other 10,851 verbs, approximately, cover the remaining 0,5% of French verbs. If you can tolerate slightly less coverage, the number of verbs needed goes down dramatically. For example, at 95%, which is not exactly shabby, the number of verbs needed is 583. I really like the fact that only 63 verbs give you 75%. Although the tables don't show it, if I remember correctly, four verbs account for around 30% of all verb coverage. Again, and I don't see why it is necessary to repeat this position, I say that a nice little 300-word set whose structure I've already given should allow us to talk about the lycée militaire and buying a train ticket and maybe even being stopped by the police for a contrôle d'identité. But not also about foie gras and the grand cru wines of Bordeaux. I actually would be willing to have a go at providing a dialogue for buying a Paris-Marseille ticket and combining all three dialogues to see what kind of vocabulary range we get. The more I think about it, the more I might just do exactly that. Edited by s_allard on 07 September 2014 at 10:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4915 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 50 of 55 07 September 2014 at 9:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
You wouldn't have to add them at once, of course. Nouns can be added as and when needed, and you can even have a bit of control over the conversations you have. You could say, "Tomorrow I'm going to buy a bus ticket, then visit a cafe. So today I need to learn the vocabulary related to taking a bus, and ordering a few items." Of course you can't control where any of these conversations might go, but you can always try to steer conversations back to familiar territory. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5436 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 51 of 55 07 September 2014 at 9:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
That's exactly what I have been saying. Learn the words as you need them. Edited by s_allard on 07 September 2014 at 10:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5242 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 52 of 55 01 October 2014 at 12:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
OK, after a bit of a learning curve with Github I've got the DB up and running. But I seem to have a difference in my figures as compared to yours. I am looking for the 98% minus nouns, articles, and pronouns. deducting from your 98% numbers I get a remaining value of 3947 words. But when I run my SQL and do a count() I get 5397. So where have I gone wrong? I'm OK with SQL although I've never used sqlite before.
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 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5538 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 53 of 55 01 October 2014 at 1:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm glad to see you got everything up and running! I hope the process wasn't too horrible. My table was generated by analyzing each part of speech separately. You can see the whole process in the notebook, in the section titled "Text coverage by part of speech." Part way through the analysis, I switched from raw SQL to Pandas and custom Python code. But you can get the same results using raw SQL:
You'll need to run this for each interesting value of "cgram" in order to reproduce my results. For some parts of speech, you'll need "cgram IN ('AUX', 'VER')", or "cgram LIKE 'PRO%'" to combine related categories. I think the fundamental reason that your numbers don't line up with mine is that you took 98% coverage and tried to filter the nouns out, whereas I calculated coverage individually for each part of speech. And also take a look at the difference between the tables lexique, lemme, and lemme_simple. The lexique table is raw data, the lemme table sums over lemma+part-of-speech, and the lemme_simple table discards parts-of-speech completely. Also, don't hesitate to fire up the IPython notebook interface and mess directly with the Python code. The learning curve is pretty short, and you can do all kinds of cool stuff just by tweaking my code and running it interactively. Python has tons of awesome libraries for language processing, data analysis and graphing, and IPython is beyond cool. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5242 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 54 of 55 01 October 2014 at 3:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It wasn't too bad. The worst part was trying to remember my github password. :)
Python is nice, but I'm an old man and my weapons of choice are C, Perl, and Assembler; in that order. :D I noticed some odd data: 2e;ADJ;0.04;100.0 58e;ADJ;0.03;100.0 A quick grep through the original file (lexique.txt), showed these values there also. Any idea what they are? Just an anomaly perhaps? EDIT: Referring to: 2e and 58e Edited by rdearman on 01 October 2014 at 3:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5538 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 55 of 55 01 October 2014 at 4:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
Welcome to the wonderful world of natural language processing! When working with NLP data sets and corpora, there's always going to be some weird dirt in your data. In this case, I bet these tokens are abbreviations for deuxième and cinq-huitième which appeared sufficiently frequently in the underlying corpus to qualify for inclusion. In theory, the right way to deal with these issues is to treat your input data as probability distribution. If you only see something once or twice, and it doesn't fit in nicely with the other data, maybe it's an artifact. If you only some something once, but it looks like a perfectly normal -er verb, then maybe you can believe it. Basically, before placing too much faith in any isolated data point, see Shirky's article on why reasoning via syllogisms doesn't work in the real world. Basically, the simplest model you can actually get away with is something like naive Bayes with additive smoothing to eliminate absolute probabilities of 0% and 100%. You don't need to dig through all the math. Basically all you need is an illustrated guide to Bayes' rule, and a rule which says, "Nothing is ever 100% certain, so I'll change 100% to 99.9%, and 0% to 0.1%." For a purely linguistic justification of why you need to think this way, see Norvig's famous response to Chomsky. Fortunately, you're working with frequency data here, which means that you don't need to deal with low-frequency garbage data explicitly. Instead, you can just ORDER BY filmfreq2 DESC LIMIT ___, which will discard most of your garbage data below the cutoff. Of course, you'll still have other sorts of garbage higher up in the list if the tokenizer thought that aujourd'hui was two words, or whatever. In short, don't place any more faith in your data than it deserves. Edited by emk on 01 October 2014 at 4:45pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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