SVALex is a lexicon of receptive vocabulary for Swedish as a second/foreign language (SVA) that reports the normalized frequencies of words (lemmas) across 5 of the six levels of the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages), excluding C2. Apart from information on single word usage, this list also contains multi-word expressions and information on their usage at different levels, something that is rarely present in the resources of this kind.

The frequencies have been estimated on a corpus of SVA textbooks, COCTAILL. More details on the corpus can be found in

An article on the resource in general, including methods for computation and normalization of the word frequencies is available:

Features

menu_book	Receptive lexicon includes word frequencies observed in textbook reading activities and simplified readers
bar_chart	CEFR levels A1 · A2 · B1 · B2 · C1
toc	Lexical entries lemma (word) part of speech (tag)
calculate	Computed metrics level_freq · normalized frequency (per 1 million words) for each level of the CEFR total_freq · total normalized frequency in the source corpus nb_doc · document frequency

Format

The format is a .CSV (tab separated values) file with 8 columns (see above), encoded in UTF-8. You can also open it in an excel sheet.

Example of some entries from SVALex

Lemma	POS-tag	A1	A2	B1	B2	C1	Total
bil	NN_UTR	430.2138	1234.2078	728.9847	422.283	363.5446	618.8567
överge	VB	0	0	7.3203	24.5182	39.6516	17.2695
rättvisa	NN_UTR	0	0	3.6601	25.6189	26.4344	13.6602
kilo	NN_NEU	0	302.0833	145.1229	65.0611	13.2172	89.8907
resa	VB	166.3009	375.2582	450.3526	298.4905	330.4297	356.362
låg	JJ	0	49.315	125.922	217.3103	252.1311	156.126
så klart	ABM_MWE	0	16.2635	81.6019	45.5033	13.2172	38.1738
till skillnad från	PPM_MWE	0	0	5.3395	2.409	3.6699	5.1839

Usage

search Search

The resource can be used to compare the frequency distribution of multiple words along the CEFR scale. An online query interface is available and can be accessed via the Search tab.

bar_chart Analyse

The resource can also be used to analyze the complexity of words in a text, in particular to identify which of the words in a text will be difficult at a given level. An online complexity analyzer is available and can be accessed via the Analyze tab.

Authors

SVALex is the result of a collaboration between two teams:

• The Center for Natural Language Processing (CENTAL) at UCLouvain;
• The Språkbanken research unit of the University of Gothenburg.

Contributors