The first kind of scoring function was language independent (e.g, penalize words showing up from the training set, penalize < 3 character words, penalize duplic

The first kind of scoring function was language independent (e.g, penalize words showing up from the training set, penalize < 3 character words, penalize duplicate words, penalize common words), and the second scoring function needed a large training set of English words (but could be any other training set). All this is described at the top. I guess you didn't read that.