The relationship between dictionary look-up frequency and corpus frequency revisited: a log-file analysis of a decade of user interaction with a Swahili-English dictionary
In an earlier publication it was claimed that there is no useful relationship between Swahili- English dictionary look-up frequencies and the occurrence frequencies for the same wordforms in Swahili-English corpora, at least not beyond the top few thousand wordforms. This result was challenged us...
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Main Authors: | , , |
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Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2019
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Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/14095/1/34284-114239-1-PB.pdf http://journalarticle.ukm.my/14095/ http://ejournal.ukm.my/gema/issue/view/1227 |
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Summary: | In an earlier publication it was claimed that there is no useful relationship between Swahili-
English dictionary look-up frequencies and the occurrence frequencies for the same
wordforms in Swahili-English corpora, at least not beyond the top few thousand wordforms.
This result was challenged using data for German by a different team of researchers using an
improved methodology. In the present article the original Swahili-English data is revisited,
using ten years’ worth of it rather than just two, and using the improved methodology. We
conclude that there is indeed a positive relationship. In addition, we show that online
dictionary look-up behaviour is remarkably similar across languages, even when, as in our
case, one is dealing with languages from very dissimilar language families. Furthermore,
online dictionaries turn out to have minimum look-up success rates, below which they simply
cannot go. These minima are language-sensitive and vary depending on the regularity of the
searched-for entries, but are otherwise constant no matter the size of randomly sampled
dictionaries. Corpus-informed sampling always improves on any random method. Lastly,
from the point of view of the graphical user interface, we argue that the average user of an
online bilingual dictionary is better served with a single search box, rather than separate
search boxes for each dictionary side. |
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