Lexical Diversity Metrics
Lexical diversity measures vocabulary richness by quantifying the relationship between unique words (types) and total words (tokens).
Available Metrics
TTR (Type-Token Ratio)
- Formula: Types / Tokens
- Range: 0 to 1
- Note: Sensitive to text length
CTTR (Corrected TTR)
- Formula: Types / sqrt(2 × Tokens)
- Note: Partially corrects for text length
MSTTR (Mean Segmental TTR)
- Method: Divides text into segments (default 100 words) and averages TTR
- Range: 0 to 1
MATTR (Moving Average TTR)
- Method: Calculates TTR for a moving window and averages
- Range: 0 to 1
- Note: More stable across text lengths
MTLD (Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity)
- Method: Calculates mean length of word strings maintaining TTR above threshold
- Note: Text-length independent
Maas
- Formula: (log(Tokens) - log(Types)) / log(Tokens)²
- Note: Lower values = higher diversity (inverse scale)
Yule's K
- Method: Based on word frequency distribution
- Note: Lower values = higher diversity (inverse scale)
Simpson's D
- Method: Probability two randomly selected words are the same
- Range: 0 to 1
- Note: Lower values = higher diversity (inverse scale)
Usage Notes
- MTLD and MATTR are more stable across different text lengths
- TTR is sensitive to text length - compare only similar-length texts
- Maas, Yule's K, and Simpson's D use inverse scales (lower = more diverse)