Frequently Used Word

A Frequently Used Word is a word that is a frequent item in some linguistic context (e.g. a corpus).

• AKA: Common Word.
• Context:
  • It can (typically) have a high Word Rank in a Frequently Used Word List.
  • It can be a Frequent Dictionary Word (also Dictionary Words).
  • It can range from being a Frequent Function Word to being a Frequent Content Word (of content words).
• Example(s):
  • Common English Word, such as: “our”, and “smile”.
  • Common French Word, such as: “nous”.
  • Common German Word, such as: ...
  • Common Chinese Word, such as: “das”.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • an Uncommon Word, such as: “semi-occasional” and “antidisestablishmentarianism”
  • a Technical Term, such as: “E. coli”.
  • a Frequently Used Character.
  • a Frequent Word Bigram.
• See: Word Co-Occurrence Matrix, Word Sense Disambiguation Task.

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References

1991

• (Brown et al., 1991) ⇒ Peter F. Brown, Stephen A. Della Pietra, Vincent J. Della Pietra, Robert L. Mercer. (1991). “Word-Sense Disambiguation Using Statistical Methods.” In: Proceedings of the 29th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 1991) doi:10.3115/981344.981378
  • QUOTE: We used the flip-flop algorithm in a pilot experiment in which we assigned two senses to each of the 500 most common English words and two senses to each of the 200 most common French words.

    Since the entropy of the translation of a common word can be as high as five bits, there is reason to hope that using more senses will further improve the performance of our system.

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