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A Model for Function Word Counts
Author(s) -
Bailey B. J. R.
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
journal of the royal statistical society: series c (applied statistics)
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.205
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9876
pISSN - 0035-9254
DOI - 10.2307/2347816
Subject(s) - function (biology) , word (group theory) , statistics , natural language processing , econometrics , computer science , linguistics , mathematics , philosophy , biology , evolutionary biology
SUMMARY Researchers in linguistics have considered an author's use of function words, or context‐free words, as providing one measure of his style. The number of occurrences of a single word, such as ‘and‘, or an uncommon group of words, in a fixed sample of n words, can often be modelled by a binomial distribution. However, this model sometimes breaks down for more common groups of words, such as all the articles, a group of pronouns etc. For such cases, a more realistic model is presented and analysed, based on a simple Markov chain model of English usage.