seanghay/khmer-search-frequency

Khmer Search Frequency

How often each Khmer dictionary headword was the word a user was actually looking for, measured by real lookup demand rather than corpus occurrence.

Each row is a headword and the number of search sessions that ended on it. A session counts only when the user settled on that word: sessions abandoned by backspacing to a fragment are excluded, since single Khmer letters are themselves headwords and would otherwise dominate the ranking.

Columns

column	description
word	headword, in the spelling the dictionary prints
sessions	search sessions that ended on this word
clients	distinct anonymous clients contributing (always >= 5)

Uses

Khmer word frequency grounded in what people look up: keyboard and autocomplete prediction, vocabulary curriculum ordering, lexicographic prioritisation, language model and OCR/ASR rescoring.

Note this measures lookup frequency, which is close to the inverse of familiarity — common words are looked up rarely. It is a demand signal, not a corpus frequency, and the two should not be used interchangeably.

Derived from anonymous search logs of khmerdict.com, collected December 2024 - August 2026 across roughly 3.2M searches by ~153,000 anonymous clients.

Privacy

This dataset contains no logs and no identifiers. It was produced by an aggregation pipeline that:

• requires every row to be attributable to at least 5 distinct clients, so no row can describe a single person's search;
• discards client identifiers, IP addresses, user agents and timestamps entirely — they are never read into the output;
• restricts all Khmer text to single words matching [\u1780-\u17DD]+, excluding digits, Latin characters, punctuation and whitespace, so no row can carry a phone number, email address, URL or freeform phrase;
• constrains words to dictionary headwords or strings within two edits of one.

At k=5, roughly 9% of distinct queries survive while retaining about 79% of total search volume: the discarded tail is where re-identification risk lives, not where the linguistic value is.

The source logs are not published and will not be.