[Vanguard] Pesky meanings
Posted on:: September 23rd, 2003
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.
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
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.
Alt ett ord kan bety
David Weinberger er på konferanse og har lært at The most frequently used nouns in English have an average of
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.