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Language Log » Word frequencies in LOTR vs. Dickens

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu·Mark Liberman·about 2 months ago
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« previous post | next post » Following up on " Meadow writing ", I thought it might be interesting to look at LOTR-associated word frequencies, using the the "weighted log-odds-ratio, informative dirichlet prior" algorithm Monroe, Colaresi, and Quinn 2009, " Fightin' Words ", as discussed in seven previous LLOG posts . In particular, I thought I'd compare The Fellowship of the Ring to 16 of Charles Dickens' works . Given existing scripts, this was an easy half-hour Breakfast Experiment™. And the results were mostly as expected. The Fellowship of the Ring end of the list is mostly populated with the names of LOTR proper names, like frodo, gandalf, bilbo, hobbits, pippin , etc. There are also a fair number of landscape-related words, as expected given that the plot involves a mostly-outdoor journey: mountains, trees, hills, path, forest, river, woods, etc.…

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