word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 473292 | S- |
2 | 359214 | C- |
3 | 346599 | M- |
4 | 325211 | A- |
5 | 303819 | P- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 100794 | Ma- |
2 | 77080 | Co- |
3 | 74589 | co- |
4 | 66694 | Th- |
5 | 63668 | Ch- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 58158 | www- |
2 | 48749 | The- |
3 | 29855 | �- |
4 | 28411 | Mar- |
5 | 27101 | htt- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 57658 | www.- |
2 | 39819 | The- |
3 | 27084 | http- |
4 | 16661 | non-- |
5 | 15041 | Inte- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 26180 | http:- |
2 | 12763 | Inter- |
3 | 8464 | inter- |
4 | 7367 | multi- |
5 | 7253 | John- |
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