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"Arabic language Word frequency Dictionaries."
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Frequency, Informativity and Word Length: Insights from Typologically Diverse Corpora
Zipf’s law of abbreviation, which posits a negative correlation between word frequency and length, is one of the most famous and robust cross-linguistic generalizations. At the same time, it has been shown that contextual informativity (average surprisal given previous context) is more strongly correlated with word length, although this tendency is not observed consistently, depending on several methodological choices. The present study examines a more diverse sample of languages than the previous studies (Arabic, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Russian, Spanish and Turkish). I use large web-based corpora from the Leipzig Corpora Collection to estimate word lengths in UTF-8 characters and in phonemes (for some of the languages), as well as word frequency, informativity given previous word and informativity given next word, applying different methods of bigrams processing. The results show different correlations between word length and the corpus-based measure for different languages. I argue that these differences can be explained by the properties of noun phrases in a language, most importantly, by the order of heads and modifiers and their relative morphological complexity, as well as by orthographic conventions.
Journal Article
The development of frequency-based assessments of vocabulary breadth and depth for L2 arabic
Lexical knowledge is an essential component of language knowledge. Vocabulary size has consistently been found to be correlated with other measures of language proficiency and to predict functional language ability. Assessment formats designed to measure lexical knowledge have been influenced by the rich description of lexical patterns made possible by recent advances in corpus linguistics; in particular, these assessments have incorporated word frequency statistics as an organizing structural principle. This dissertation details the development of three frequency-based, web-delivered assessments, modelled on established English as a Foreign Language formats, designed to measure the vocabulary knowledge of non-native learners of Arabic. Word frequency data for these assessments was taken from Buckwalter and Parkinson’s Frequency Dictionary of Arabic. This study represents the first empirical, frequency-based investigation of learner vocabulary knowledge carried out for Arabic. This dissertation discusses the test development process and identifies challenges inherent to the development of Arabic pseudowords and limitations of both space-delimited strings and raw lemmas as Arabic word units. Following test piloting, 161 non-native learners of Arabic of varying proficiency and experience levels completed the assessments and a learner history questionnaire. Reliability and item performance metrics indicate that these assessments are able to successfully distinguish between learners with varying amounts of vocabulary knowledge. Other questions investigated in the study include (1) the effect of word frequency ranking on item performance, (2) the ability of learner independent variables to predict assessment performance, and (3) the internal correlation of the three assessment measures. Results indicate that word frequency was significantly correlated with item facility ratings. Learner years of study and self-reported proficiency were both effective predictors of performance on the assessments. Results on the two measures of vocabulary size were highly correlated with each other and with the results of the third format, designed to measure depth of vocabulary knowledge. Aggregate group performance by years of study indicates an acquisition rate of 800 to 1000 words per year, although some caution may be necessary in generalizing the results of this population to the larger population of L2 Arabic learners.
Dissertation
Brief Communications Information Content in Textual Data: Revisited for Arabic Text
Arabic as opposed to English is a highly redundant lan- guage due to its morphological nature. A study was done to measure this redundancy and compare it to its respective values in English. Samples of books, news papers, and social magazines were used to measure the entropy of the Arabic language using the n-gram method generated from a moving window of eight char acters. Studies of the dependencies of characters on each other was done, as well as a study on the average distribution of word lengths. The results obtained indi cated the ability of Arabic to be more compressible than English, and that of course is due to its morphological nature. The average length of Arabic words was found to be longer than English words due to the fact that Ara bic words contain morphological extensions.
Journal Article