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The use of film subtitles to estimate word frequencies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2007

BORIS NEW ,
MARC BRYSBAERT ,
JEAN VERONIS  and
CHRISTOPHE PALLIER
BORIS NEW
Affiliation:
Université Paris Descartes and CNRS
MARC BRYSBAERT
Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, University of London
JEAN VERONIS
Affiliation:
Université de Provence
CHRISTOPHE PALLIER
Affiliation:
CNRS, INSERM, and Service Hospitalier Frédéric Joliot
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Abstract

We examine the use of film subtitles as an approximation of word frequencies in human interactions. Because subtitle files are widely available on the Internet, they may present a fast and easy way to obtain word frequency measures in language registers other than text writing. We compiled a corpus of 52 million French words, coming from a variety of films. Frequency measures based on this corpus compared well to other spoken and written frequency measures, and explained variance in lexical decision times in addition to what is accounted for by the available French written frequency measures.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , October 2007 , pp. 661 - 677
Copyright
2007 Cambridge University Press

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