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September 23, 2003

[Vanguard] Pesky meanings

Fun factoid from Elizabeth Liddy (director of the Central for NLP at Syracuse U) who's talking about doing context-aware natural language processing: The most frequently used nouns in English have an average of 7 meanings and the most frequently-used verbs have 11.

As always, I got my facts reversed. The entry above is now correct.

Posted by D. Weinberger at September 23, 2003 02:48 PM

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Comments

Your intuition is right on! I must have mis-spoken! The most frequently used nouns in English have 7 possible meanings (senses) and the most frequently used verbs have 11.

Liz

Posted by: Liz Liddy | September 24, 2003 10:45 AM

It just occurred to me, that this is maybe the explanation of why Bush repeated what seemed to be the same UN speech that he gave several months ago.

Posted by: John Erickson | September 24, 2003 02:54 PM

I don't believe this statistic without seeing the distribution. Word usage follows a power law; I bet meanings do too.

If so 'average' becomes meaningless. Without defining 'most' the stat is just noise.

If you said that there was a correlation between usage and number of meanings with a given slope and person's R, that would make more sense.

Posted by: Kevin Marks | September 24, 2003 09:57 PM

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