word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 75301 | S- |
2 | 45633 | B- |
3 | 40940 | A- |
4 | 39969 | K- |
5 | 37010 | M- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 17375 | Sc- |
2 | 15684 | St- |
3 | 13796 | Ge- |
4 | 12915 | Be- |
5 | 10250 | Ma- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 16786 | Sch- |
2 | 8931 | Ver- |
3 | 6148 | ver- |
4 | 4789 | Sta- |
5 | 4364 | Ein- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 2336 | Schw- |
2 | 2317 | Schl- |
3 | 2304 | Schu- |
4 | 2178 | Unte- |
5 | 2115 | Scha- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 2163 | Unter- |
2 | 1386 | Kinde- |
3 | 1374 | Gesch- |
4 | 1335 | Inter- |
5 | 1327 | Schul- |
The tables show the most frequent letter-N-grams at the beginning of words for N=1…5. Their frequency is count without multiplicity, otherwise the stopwords would dominate the tables.
As shown in the above example (German), word prefixes are clearly visible. In the above example, ver- and ein- are prefixes, and Sch- is not. At the end of a prefix we typically have a wide variety of possible continuations. Hence a prefix of length k will be prominent in the table for N=k, but typically not in the table for N=k+1. The prominent entries Schw- and Schl- for N=4 tell us that Sch- is no prefix.
Zipf’s diagram is plotted with both axis in logarithmic scale, hence we expect nearly straight lines. The graphs look more typical for larger N. Especially for N=3 we find only a small number of trigrams resulting in a sharp decay.
For a language unknown to the reader, the data can easily be used to see whether prefixes do exist and to find the most prominent examples.
For counting, only words with a minimum character length of 10 were considered.
Because only a word list is needed, the tables above can be generated from a relatively small corpus.
For N=3:
SELECT @pos:=(@pos+1), xx.* from (SELECT @pos:=0) r, (select count(*) as cnt, concat(left(word,3),"-") FROM words WHERE w_id>100 group by left(word,3) order by cnt desc) xx limit 5;
For more insight in a language, longer lists might be useful.
Is there a need for larger N
Most frequent word endings
Most frequent letter-N-grams
Number of letter-N-Grams at word beginnings
Number of letter-N-Grams at word endings