[Ads-l] Size matters

Shawnee Moon moon.shawnee at GMAIL.COM
Tue May 30 23:50:34 UTC 2017


Hello,

I'm curious if anyone knows of a program which can estimate a person's vocabulary.

I know my book-writing program (iBooks Author) can tell me how many times I used certain words, but not how many different words I used. But I'm not talking about my writing, I'm talking about public speakers, presidents (ahem) or whomever.

I just wondered if there's an algorithm or other program that can "hear" a variety of speeches made by a person and give a reasonably close estimation of the number of different words the speaker uses, (in public speaking, unless one would be willing to wear a microphone all the time) and then perhaps an estimate of their total vocabulary. 

Bottom line: I'd like to know the difference between Trump's total vocabulary versus other presidents or g-men. There, I said it.

Mailed from the Moon 🌜
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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