Another Perspective on Vocabulary Richness
Computers and the HumanitiesPublished 4 April 2003
David L. Hoover
Citations127
SNIP1.79
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TL;DR
Vocabulary richness is of marginal value in stylistic and authorship studies because the basic assumption that it constitutes awordprint for authors is false.
Abstract
This article examines the usefulness ofvocabulary richness for authorship attributionand tests the assumption that appropriatemeasures of vocabulary richness can capture anauthor's distinctive style or identity. Afterbriefly discussing perceived and actualvocabulary richness, I show that doubling andcombining texts affects some measures incomputationally predictable but conceptuallysurprising ways. I discuss some theoretical andempirical problems with some measures anddevelop simple methods to test how wellvocabulary richness distinguishes texts bydifferent authors. These methods show thatvocabulary richness is ineffective for largegroups of texts because of the extremevariability within and among them. I concludethat vocabulary richness is of marginal valuein stylistic and authorship studies because thebasic assumption that it constitutes awordprint for authors is false.
Keywords
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