Words: Frequency Lists

When the Words tool is opened, a frequency list will automatically be created based on the selected corpus and default settings. If this is being done for the first time, #LancsBox X will take a short time to compute and store the frequency information. This data is stored for later use, meaning that frequency lists will load very quickly when the tool is opened again.

By default, the currently selected corpus and the unit ‘word’ will be selected. These can be changed easily by selecting a different corpus, subcorpus, or unit in the dropdown menus shown below:

a) By clicking the corpus name on the left, a different corpus can be selected.

b) By clicking the drop-down menu in the centre, any subcorpora that have been defined in the active corpus can be selected.

c) By clicking the drop down menu on the right, the unit used for the frequency list can be selected (e.g. word, hw, part of speech [POS], lemma, lexeme).

The image below shows the Words panel for the BNC2014 corpus. As shown in the image, all frequency and dispersion measures are computed at once.

Frequency lists can be searched by typing a search term into the ‘Search query’ box at the top of the panel and pressing Enter. This will locate and highlight the search term in the frequency list as shown below:

Lists can also be sorted by left clicking on any of the headers in the table. Clicking once will sort terms in alphabetical order, and all frequencies and statistics from largest to smallest. Left clicking the same header again will reverse the order.

Finally, lists can be filtered by selecting the filter button which appears when hovering the mouse over any column heading as shown below. Filters can be applied to more than one heading simultaneously.

Keywords lists can also be generated using the Words tool. More information about Keywords in #LancsBox X can be found here.