[Corpora-List] rare words

[N M Chipere]

Dear all,

Is anyone familiar with the issues surrounding the definition and
measurement of word rarity? My colleagues and I are currently treating
the first two  thousand most frequent words in English as common words and
the rest as rare (excluding proper nouns, numerals, etc). Apart from the
issue of where one puts the cut-off point, there is an obvious problem to
do with homographs, for which we don't have a simple solution.

I'd be grateful for any feedback.

Ngoni

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Dr Ngoni Chipere
Institute of Education
The University of Reading
Reading
Berkshire RG6 1HY

tel: 0118 987 5123 x 4943
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