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Do 20 pages of a book gives you 90% of its words?
- bryanrasmussen 9y agoThe use of Eve's diary doesn't make any sense here, of course the distribution of words in a short story are going to be longer than in a book. Ulysses is fair, but I would expect it and works of a similar caliber to be outliers.
- kiechu 9y agoIt is Myth Buster's kind of science. The goal was to see how it works with short and long books and with one with reputation being easy and a hard read. It would be interesting to see it on larger population, with more of statistic involved.
- dri_ft 9y agoFor the record, Ulysses is at least a full order of magnitude more comprehensible than Joyce's next book, Finnegans' Wake. I'd also expect it to give a skewed response on a test of this kind because it is composed of a number of different sections, which vary considerably in their style. But maybe that's the point of including it.
- kiechu 9y agoHere are Finnegans Wake graphs. It is indeed even more complicated. https://github.com/vocapouch/vocapouch-research/blob/master/.. https://github.com/vocapouch/vocapouch-research/blob/master/.... Number of Pages: 729 Number of Total Words: 218793 Number of Unique Words: 50872 You will know 90% of words after 387 pages which are 53.09% of the book. At that page, you will know 60.64% of unique words.
- al452 9y ago"incomprehensibility"
- kiechu 9y agoFixed. Thank you!
- twoodfin 9y agoFWIW, Ulysses isn't particularly incomprehensible. To the extent that it's difficult to read, it's much more the shifting narrative perspective, widely ranging references, and stream-of-consciousness rather than the vocabulary. Take this typical section from the "Lotus Eaters" chapter, wherein Mr. Bloom is contemplating the origins of the wares in a tea shop: So warm. His right hand once more more slowly went over again: choice blend, made of the finest Ceylon brands. The far east. Lovely spot it must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on, cactuses, flowery meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like that. Those Cinghalese lobbing around in the sun, in dolce far niente. Not doing a hand's turn all day. Sleep six months out of twelve. Too hot to quarrel. Influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of idleness. The air feeds most. Azotes. Hothouse in Botanic gardens. Sensitive plants. Waterlilies. Petals too tired to. Sleeping sickness in the air. Hard to be too confused by the imagery and mood in this passage. Now, Finnegans Wake...
- kiechu 9y agoI will run Finnegans Wake in a moment and I will get back with a response. I must find it in a text format.
- rfrank 9y agoI wonder how Pale Fire by Nabokov would look after this sort of analysis. For the unfamiliar, per wikipedia, "Starting with the table of contents, Pale Fire looks like the publication of a 999-line poem in four cantos ("Pale Fire") by the fictional John Shade with a Foreword, extensive Commentary, and Index by his self-appointed editor, Charles Kinbote. Kinbote's Commentary takes the form of notes to various numbered lines of the poem. Here and in the rest of his critical apparatus, Kinbote explicates the poem surprisingly little. Focusing instead on his own concerns, he divulges what proves to be the plot piece by piece, some of which can be connected by following the many cross-references. Espen Aarseth noted that Pale Fire "can be read either unicursally, straight through, or multicursally, jumping between the comments and the poem."[4] Thus although the narration is non-linear and multidimensional, the reader can still choose to read the novel in a linear manner without risking misinterpretation."
- s_kilk 9y agoHuh, sounds a little like House Of Leaves, which has a similarly weird structure. I'll have to check out Pale Fire.
- rfrank 9y agoAh nice, I need to do the same with House of Leaves, I'm a big fan of stories with unconventional structuring. Sometimes a Great Notion by Kesey is my favorite; it's told from multiple first-person perspectives that shift pretty rapidly, where the shifts are indicated by having a particular speakers' text italicized, in parenthesis, with no formatting applied, etc. It's pretty neat.
- Finch2192 9y agoThis doesn't seem all that groundbreaking, it's just an instance of Zipf's law in action, is it not?
- kiechu 9y agoYes, that's Zipf's law applied. I doubt that many language learners knew about this law. I think it is still worth pointing out, that when you go through the beginning of the book, reading will become rapidly easier.
- twoodfin 9y agoIt'd be an interesting exercise in Modernist writing to try producing a book that violates Zipf's law, say by hashing all but the most common few hundred words into chapter buckets.
- contravariant 9y agoMaybe, but if you know a nice proof I'd love to hear it.
- ppod 9y agoSpecifically the equivalent Heap's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaps%27_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaps%27_law
- ihaveajob 9y agoI bet this is not true for the Encyclopedia Britannica, by design.
- pealco 9y agoThis doesn't really address your teacher's claim about having to look words up, though. What you want to look at is the distribution of low frequency words across the book. What do the plots look like when you remove proper nouns, functional words (e.g., "the", "and", prepositions) and, say, the top 1000 most frequent words in English?
- anon1094 9y agoWould be very interesting to see this applied to blogs in different categories to rapidly learn languages through reading based on the words that you currently know and the most frequent words in that language. So it would always present you with the article that suits your level and you would have the benefit of learning the most new words.
- kiechu 9y agoThat's something worth trying.
- _asummers 9y agoAlso would be interesting to see it applied to newspapers, with obvious slices like particular author, section (sports v world news etc) distribution year to year, and which paper. TV news broadcasting could also be interesting to compare by the same dimensions, though the conversational style in some interview shows would possibly make this less telling. .
- kiechu 9y agoIt probably would look more or less similar. They are excluded very quickly. There is something I cannot asses: How is the word important to understanding the sequence?
- mannykannot 9y agoI imagine it would look very much like the plots of unique words given in the article. As you suspect, the chances of coming across one of these is much more evenly distributed.
- oconnor0 9y agoNot if it's a dictionary!
- kiechu 9y agoOr a phone book.
- loeg 9y ago> we turned words to their basic forms (went to go, cars to car, jumps to jump etc.) FYI, this is called stemming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stemming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stemming
- elchief 9y agoor contextually, lemmatization
- gattilorenz 9y agoThat's correct, it's lemmatization. Stemming does not reduce "went" to "go"
- kazinator 9y agoAs little as one character of almost any document will usually give you 100% of the binary symbols 0 and 1. Usually, the first character will do this, after which the rest of it is just mindless repetition.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- js8 9y agoI think this is a very useful idea - it could be used to "rate" the books for English learners to see how difficult they are.
- imron 9y agoAlthough it sounds high, recognising 90% of words makes for a pretty horrible reading experience. That's 1 word in 10 that you don't know (1-2 words per sentence), or assuming as you did in that post a page length of 300 words, then it's 30 new words a page. I actually recently wrote an article discussing the same phenomenon in Chinese [0] Where to get a reasonable level of new characters (e.g. no more than 1 a page) you'd need to know 99.8% of the text on any page. And the level of recognition required to be able to recognise and learn new words completely from context is about 98%. [1] 0: https://www.chinesethehardway.com/article/hsk-6-gets-you-halfway/ https://www.chinesethehardway.com/article/hsk-6-gets-you-hal... 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbYMZZISPrU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbYMZZISPrU
- maaaats 9y agoI've read a lot of books in languages I didn't know well at the time. I often got the gist of the story. Mostly unknown adjectives describing possibly unknown objects to set the mood. Of course the story is not as good without, but it works.
- jaclaz 9y agoI know nothing of Chinese, but in western languages, like English, a number of words may be "unique" when counted by a simple algorithm, (even if - as the author did - words were reduced to their "basic form" thus deduplicating a lot of slightly different forms) but often you can get the meaning of the word by the context and by similarities with other knwown words, so the 90% percentage while actually meaning that you don't know 1 word every 10, does not directly mean that you cannot understand 1 word every 10 or that your reading experience is so horrible. Every reader attempting to learn a new language goes through that odd phase where he/she can manage to understand the overall meaning of a sentence even if there is one or two "holes" in it, and actually it is part of the learning process.
- imron 9y agoAlthough you might be able to pick up the meaning or get the gist of the occasional word at 1 in 10, the video I linked to in [1] above makes a convincing case that the rate at which unknown words stop being a hindrance to understanding and can be picked up from context is around 98%
- nl 9y agoThis is good, interesting work. I wonder what the difference between stemming and lemmatization shows? Edit: I see you are doing lemmatization now. Did you try just stemming?
- prashnts 9y agoI think their teacher was referring to Zipfian Distribution[0]. I've seen this distribution hold on Wikipedia corpus, as well. Of course it's empirical. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
- kabdib 9y agoMy mom, an english teacher, once went through my library of science fiction and analyzed it for reading level. I had the usual collection: Lots of Heinlein, Asimov, Niven, Andre Norton, etc. Her assessment: Most of the material was about 8th grade level, based on word count. From time to time I re-read one of those books, and run across pages where she had penciled-in notations and underlined words.
- zeep 9y ago90% of the words is not 90% of the meaning... but I get your point.
- flavio81 9y agoYes, if the book is 22 pages long!
- jaclaz 9y agoA nice, interesting idea, and experiment, thanks. Not so casually the blue lines remind me of the one in the graph for the birthday problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem