Vocabulary choice as an indicator of perspective
ACLShort '10 Proceedings of the ACL 2010 Conference Short Papers
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Empirical studies on corpora involve making measurements of several quantities for the purpose of comparing corpora, creating language models or to make generalizations about specific linguistic phenomena in a language. Quantities such as average word length are stable across sample sizes and hence can be reliably estimated from large enough samples. However, quantities such as vocabulary size change with sample size. Thus measurements based on a given sample will need to be extrapolated to obtain their estimates over larger unseen samples. In this work, we propose a novel nonparametric estimator of vocabulary size. Our main result is to show the statistical consistency of the estimator -- the first of its kind in the literature. Finally, we compare our proposal with the state of the art estimators (both parametric and nonparametric) on large standard corpora; apart from showing the favorable performance of our estimator, we also see that the classical Good-Turing estimator consistently underestimates the vocabulary size.