word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 209082 | s- |
2 | 181581 | b- |
3 | 157521 | S- |
4 | 148000 | v- |
5 | 133917 | p- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 63359 | be- |
2 | 62354 | ge- |
3 | 60381 | ve- |
4 | 58172 | in- |
5 | 54746 | st- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 47960 | ver- |
2 | 44384 | www- |
3 | 30139 | sch- |
4 | 19423 | inf- |
5 | 19317 | pro- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 44260 | www.- |
2 | 18063 | info- |
3 | 13320 | voor- |
4 | 11531 | onde- |
5 | 9666 | over- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 14953 | info@- |
2 | 11304 | onder- |
3 | 7010 | http:- |
4 | 6700 | water- |
5 | 6550 | inter- |
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