A Study on the Appropriate size of the Mongolian general corpus

TL;DR

This paper determines the optimal size of the Mongolian general corpus using Heaps function and TTR, concluding that 39 to 42 million tokens are sufficient for comprehensive coverage.

Contribution

It introduces a method to estimate the appropriate corpus size for Mongolian using quantitative linguistic measures.

Findings

TTR stabilizes beyond 39 million tokens

Heaps function effectively estimates corpus growth

Optimal corpus size is 39-42 million tokens

Abstract

This study aims to determine the appropriate size of the Mongolian general corpus. This study used the Heaps function and Type Token Ratio to determine the appropriate size of the Mongolian general corpus. The sample corpus of 906,064 tokens comprised texts from 10 domains of newspaper politics, economy, society, culture, sports, world articles and laws, middle and high school literature textbooks, interview articles, and podcast transcripts. First, we estimated the Heaps function with this sample corpus. Next, we observed changes in the number of types and TTR values while increasing the number of tokens by one million using the estimated Heaps function. As a result of observation, we found that the TTR value hardly changed when the number of tokens exceeded from 39 to 42 million. Thus, we conclude that an appropriate size for a Mongolian general corpus is from 39 to 42 million tokens.