Basic Quantitative Characteristics of the Modern Greek Language Using the Hellenic National Corpus

Abstract

Modern Greek is one of the least quantitatively studied modern European languages and the goal of this paper is to fill this relative void. We use the Hellenic National Corpus (HNC), which is a growing corpus that currently includes 33 million words. The corpus and all the tools used in our work were developed by the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP). In this paper we focus on three main areas: the lists of the 1000 most common words and lemmas, word length and letter frequency. We also make some comparisons with earlier work, in which we had used the previous 13 million word edition of the HNC.

Notes

¹The HNC has a Web interface and queries are possible over the Internet at the following Web address: http://hnc.ilsp.gr/

² A propos, we would like to thank all the publishers that have donated the texts used in HNC.

³This test is preferable to other statistical tests, since it does not require a specific distribution for the test parameters. The Wilcoxon test uses the differences between two pairs of measurements and gives higher weight to pairs that have a greater difference.