type-token ratio

English

Alternative forms

• TTR

Noun

type-token ratio (plural type-token ratios)

1. (corpus linguistics) The ratio of the number of different words (types) occurring in a text or corpus to the overall number of words (tokens) in the same text or corpus.
   • 2023 October 30, Herbold et al., “A large-scale comparison of human-written versus ChatGPT-generated essays”, in Scientific Reports, volume 13, page 5:

     We identify vocabulary richness by using a well-established measure of textual, lexical diversity (MTLD) which is often used in the field of automated essay grading. It takes into account the number of unique words but unlike the best-known measure of lexical diversity, the type-token ratio (TTR), it is not as sensitive to the difference in the length of the texts.

Related terms

• type-token distinction