Set covering algorithms are efficient tools for solving an optimal linguistic corpus reduction. The optimality of such a process is directly related to the descriptive features of the sentences of a reference corpus. This article suggests to verify experimentally the behaviour of three algorithms, a greedy approach and a lagrangian relaxation based one giving importance to rare events and a third one considering the Kullback-Liebler divergence between a reference and the ongoing distribution of events. The analysis of the content of the reduced corpora shows that the both first approaches stay the most effective to compress a corpus while guaranteeing a minimal content. The variant which minimises the Kullback-Liebler divergence guarantees a distribution of events close to a reference distribution as expected; however, the price for this solution is a much more important corpus. In the proposed experiments, we have also evaluated a mixed-approach considering a random complement to the smallest coverings.