Corpora: Reference

[Mari Olsen]

Can anyone provide a reference for a purported study, in which someone
analyzed the Wall Street Journal for new words, the number of which tailed
off to 20 words per (month? week?) after a certain point? Or is this an NLP
urban legend? A colleague recalls Mitch Marcus pointing out that the rate of
new word occurrences does not asymptote but rather continues at some small
but non-trivial rate, but not whether this is Marcus' own study, an
observation, or a reference to another work.

Thanks,

Mari Olsen
Microsoft-Natural Language Group