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285 lines
12 KiB
Markdown
285 lines
12 KiB
Markdown
Tools for working with word frequencies from various corpora.
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Author: Robyn Speer
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## Installation
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wordfreq requires Python 3 and depends on a few other Python modules
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(msgpack-python, langcodes, and ftfy). You can install it and its dependencies
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in the usual way, either by getting it from pip:
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pip3 install wordfreq
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or by getting the repository and running its setup.py:
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python3 setup.py install
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To handle word frequency lookups in Japanese, you need to additionally install
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mecab-python3, which itself depends on libmecab-dev. These commands will
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install them on Ubuntu:
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sudo apt-get install mecab-ipadic-utf8 libmecab-dev
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pip3 install mecab-python3
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## Usage
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wordfreq provides access to estimates of the frequency with which a word is
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used, in 15 languages (see *Supported languages* below). It loads
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efficiently-packed data structures that contain all words that appear at least
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once per million words.
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The most useful function is:
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word_frequency(word, lang, wordlist='combined', minimum=0.0)
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This function looks up a word's frequency in the given language, returning its
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frequency as a decimal between 0 and 1. In these examples, we'll multiply the
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frequencies by a million (1e6) to get more readable numbers:
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>>> from wordfreq import word_frequency
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>>> word_frequency('cafe', 'en') * 1e6
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14.45439770745928
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>>> word_frequency('café', 'en') * 1e6
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4.7863009232263805
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>>> word_frequency('cafe', 'fr') * 1e6
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2.0417379446695274
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>>> word_frequency('café', 'fr') * 1e6
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77.62471166286912
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The parameters are:
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- `word`: a Unicode string containing the word to look up. Ideally the word
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is a single token according to our tokenizer, but if not, there is still
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hope -- see *Tokenization* below.
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- `lang`: the BCP 47 or ISO 639 code of the language to use, such as 'en'.
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- `wordlist`: which set of word frequencies to use. Current options are
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'combined', which combines up to five different sources, and
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'twitter', which returns frequencies observed on Twitter alone.
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- `minimum`: If the word is not in the list or has a frequency lower than
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`minimum`, return `minimum` instead. In some applications, you'll want
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to set `minimum=1e-6` to avoid a discontinuity where the list ends, because
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a frequency of 1e-6 (1 per million) is the threshold for being included in
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the list at all.
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Other functions:
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`tokenize(text, lang)` splits text in the given language into words, in the same
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way that the words in wordfreq's data were counted in the first place. See
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*Tokenization*. Tokenizing Japanese requires the optional dependency `mecab-python3`
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to be installed.
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`top_n_list(lang, n, wordlist='combined')` returns the most common *n* words in
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the list, in descending frequency order.
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>>> from wordfreq import top_n_list
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>>> top_n_list('en', 10)
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['the', 'of', 'to', 'in', 'and', 'a', 'i', 'you', 'is', 'it']
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>>> top_n_list('es', 10)
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['de', 'la', 'que', 'el', 'en', 'y', 'a', 'no', 'los', 'es']
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`iter_wordlist(lang, wordlist='combined')` iterates through all the words in a
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wordlist, in descending frequency order.
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`get_frequency_dict(lang, wordlist='combined')` returns all the frequencies in
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a wordlist as a dictionary, for cases where you'll want to look up a lot of
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words and don't need the wrapper that `word_frequency` provides.
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`supported_languages(wordlist='combined')` returns a dictionary whose keys are
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language codes, and whose values are the data file that will be loaded to
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provide the requested wordlist in each language.
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`random_words(lang='en', wordlist='combined', nwords=5, bits_per_word=12)`
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returns a selection of random words, separated by spaces. `bits_per_word=n`
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will select each random word from 2^n words.
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If you happen to want an easy way to get [a memorable, xkcd-style
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password][xkcd936] with 60 bits of entropy, this function will almost do the
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job. In this case, you should actually run the similar function `random_ascii_words`,
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limiting the selection to words that can be typed in ASCII.
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[xkcd936]: https://xkcd.com/936/
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## Sources and supported languages
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We compiled word frequencies from five different sources, providing us examples
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of word usage on different topics at different levels of formality. The sources
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(and the abbreviations we'll use for them) are:
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- **GBooks**: Google Books Ngrams 2013
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- **LeedsIC**: The Leeds Internet Corpus
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- **SUBTLEX**: The SUBTLEX word frequency lists
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- **OpenSub**: Data derived from OpenSubtitles but not from SUBTLEX
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- **Twitter**: Messages sampled from Twitter's public stream
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- **Wikipedia**: The full text of Wikipedia in 2015
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The following 12 languages are well-supported, with reasonable tokenization and
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at least 3 different sources of word frequencies:
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Language Code GBooks SUBTLEX OpenSub LeedsIC Twitter Wikipedia
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──────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────
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Arabic ar │ - - Yes Yes Yes Yes
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German de │ - Yes - Yes Yes[1] Yes
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Greek el │ - - Yes Yes Yes Yes
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English en │ Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
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Spanish es │ - - Yes Yes Yes Yes
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French fr │ - - Yes Yes Yes Yes
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Indonesian id │ - - Yes - Yes Yes
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Italian it │ - - Yes Yes Yes Yes
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Japanese ja │ - - - Yes Yes Yes
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Malay ms │ - - Yes - Yes Yes
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Dutch nl │ - Yes Yes - Yes Yes
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Polish pl │ - - Yes - Yes Yes
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Portuguese pt │ - - Yes Yes Yes Yes
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Russian ru │ - - Yes Yes Yes Yes
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Swedish sv │ - - Yes - Yes Yes
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Turkish tr │ - - Yes - Yes Yes
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These languages are only marginally supported so far. We have too few data
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sources so far in Korean (feel free to suggest some), and we are lacking
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tokenization support for Chinese.
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Language Code GBooks SUBTLEX LeedsIC OpenSub Twitter Wikipedia
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──────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────
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Korean ko │ - - - - Yes Yes
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Chinese zh │ - Yes Yes Yes - -
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[1] We've counted the frequencies from tweets in German, such as they are, but
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you should be aware that German is not a frequently-used language on Twitter.
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Germans just don't tweet that much.
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## Tokenization
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wordfreq uses the Python package `regex`, which is a more advanced
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implementation of regular expressions than the standard library, to
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separate text into tokens that can be counted consistently. `regex`
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produces tokens that follow the recommendations in [Unicode
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Annex #29, Text Segmentation][uax29].
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There are language-specific exceptions:
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- In Arabic, it additionally normalizes ligatures and removes combining marks.
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- In Japanese, instead of using the regex library, it uses the external library
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`mecab-python3`. This is an optional dependency of wordfreq, and compiling
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it requires the `libmecab-dev` system package to be installed.
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- It does not yet attempt to tokenize Chinese ideograms.
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[uax29]: http://unicode.org/reports/tr29/
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When wordfreq's frequency lists are built in the first place, the words are
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tokenized according to this function.
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Because tokenization in the real world is far from consistent, wordfreq will
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also try to deal gracefully when you query it with texts that actually break
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into multiple tokens:
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>>> word_frequency('New York', 'en')
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0.0002632772081925718
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The word frequencies are combined with the half-harmonic-mean function in order
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to provide an estimate of what their combined frequency would be.
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This implicitly assumes that you're asking about words that frequently appear
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together. It's not multiplying the frequencies, because that would assume they
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are statistically unrelated. So if you give it an uncommon combination of
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tokens, it will hugely over-estimate their frequency:
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>>> word_frequency('owl-flavored', 'en')
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1.3557098723512335e-06
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## License
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`wordfreq` is freely redistributable under the MIT license (see
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`MIT-LICENSE.txt`), and it includes data files that may be
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redistributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0
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license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).
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`wordfreq` contains data extracted from Google Books Ngrams
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(http://books.google.com/ngrams) and Google Books Syntactic Ngrams
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(http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/books/syntactic-ngrams/index.html).
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The terms of use of this data are:
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Ngram Viewer graphs and data may be freely used for any purpose, although
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acknowledgement of Google Books Ngram Viewer as the source, and inclusion
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of a link to http://books.google.com/ngrams, would be appreciated.
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It also contains data derived from the following Creative Commons-licensed
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sources:
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- The Leeds Internet Corpus, from the University of Leeds Centre for Translation
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Studies (http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/list.html)
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- The OpenSubtitles Frequency Word Lists, compiled by Hermit Dave
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(https://invokeit.wordpress.com/frequency-word-lists/)
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- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://www.wikipedia.org)
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It contains data from various SUBTLEX word lists: SUBTLEX-US, SUBTLEX-UK, and
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SUBTLEX-CH, created by Marc Brysbaert et al. and available at
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http://crr.ugent.be/programs-data/subtitle-frequencies. SUBTLEX was first
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published in this paper:
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I (Robyn Speer) have
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obtained permission by e-mail from Marc Brysbaert to distribute these wordlists
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in wordfreq, to be used for any purpose, not just for academic use, under these
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conditions:
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- Wordfreq and code derived from it must credit the SUBTLEX authors.
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- It must remain clear that SUBTLEX is freely available data.
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These terms are similar to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
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Some additional data was collected by a custom application that watches the
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streaming Twitter API, in accordance with Twitter's Developer Agreement &
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Policy. This software gives statistics about words that are commonly used on
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Twitter; it does not display or republish any Twitter content.
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## Citations to work that wordfreq is built on
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- Brysbaert, M. & New, B. (2009). Moving beyond Kucera and Francis: A Critical
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Evaluation of Current Word Frequency Norms and the Introduction of a New and
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Improved Word Frequency Measure for American English. Behavior Research
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Methods, 41 (4), 977-990.
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http://sites.google.com/site/borisnew/pub/BrysbaertNew2009.pdf
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- Brysbaert, M., Buchmeier, M., Conrad, M., Jacobs, A. M., Bölte, J., & Böhl, A.
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(2015). The word frequency effect. Experimental Psychology.
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http://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/abs/10.1027/1618-3169/a000123?journalCode=zea
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- Cai, Q., & Brysbaert, M. (2010). SUBTLEX-CH: Chinese word and character
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frequencies based on film subtitles. PLoS One, 5(6), e10729.
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http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0010729
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- Dave, H. (2011). Frequency word lists.
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https://invokeit.wordpress.com/frequency-word-lists/
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- Davis, M. (2012). Unicode text segmentation. Unicode Standard Annex, 29.
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http://unicode.org/reports/tr29/
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- Keuleers, E., Brysbaert, M. & New, B. (2010). SUBTLEX-NL: A new frequency
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measure for Dutch words based on film subtitles. Behavior Research Methods,
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42(3), 643-650.
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http://crr.ugent.be/papers/SUBTLEX-NL_BRM.pdf
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- Kudo, T. (2005). Mecab: Yet another part-of-speech and morphological
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analyzer.
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http://mecab.sourceforge.net/
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- van Heuven, W. J., Mandera, P., Keuleers, E., & Brysbaert, M. (2014).
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SUBTLEX-UK: A new and improved word frequency database for British English.
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The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 67(6), 1176-1190.
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http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/17470218.2013.850521
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