[Corpora-List] Comparing learner frequencies with native frequencies

[Dominic Glennon]

Dear corporistas,

I'm trying to compare word frequencies in our native speaker corpus and
our learner corpus. Having normalised the frequencies in both corpora to
frequencies per 10 million words, a simple subtraction still heavily skews
the results towards high-frequency words. I've tried taking the log of
both normalised frequencies before subtracting to get around the Zipfian
nature of word frequency distribution - this gives better results, but is
it well-motivated? I'd be grateful for any help you could give me, or any
pointers to previous work done in this area. Many thanks,

Dom

Dominic Glennon
Systems Manager
Cambridge University Press
01223 325595

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