Abstract:
Lexical density is closely related to the notion of information packaging as content words in a text; therefore, texts with a
higher proportion of content words are dense as they contain more information as opposed to texts that have a higher
proportion of function words [10, P. 61-79]. Type-token ratio (TTR), also known as vocabulary size divided by text length, is a
simple measure of lexical diversity. Lexical diversity refers to how varied the vocabulary used in a text is. For texts of similar
length, the traditional type-token ratio can be used, which is the number of different words (types) in a text divided by the total
number of words (tokens) [1, P. 185-207]. Multiword expressions refer to a diverse group of linguistic phenomena, connected
by the fact that they do not fit neatly into the word-phrase dichotomy. Like phrases, they appear to be made up of multiple
words. In our research, we analyzed text materials with lexical density, TTR, and multiword expressions from legal texts (texts
of the United Nations). We compared the automatic analysis results to three linguistic measures in Russian, English, and
French. A 60,000-word-based corpus was built for the analysis. Our research aimed at examining the lexical density, TTR, and
multiword expressions of Russian, English, and French UN texts. To reach that goal, we used Rulingva, TextInspector, and
LancsBox to compute our data. The results showed that the linguistic features selected for the investigation could impact
complexity on account of lexical richness, being a multidimensional concept that encompasses several aspects of lexis use [12,
P. 19].
