word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 6783 | 4- |
2 | 5427 | 1- |
3 | 2904 | 2- |
4 | 2753 | 3- |
5 | 2301 | 5- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 1449 | 4.- |
2 | 1399 | 3.- |
3 | 952 | 1.- |
4 | 942 | 48- |
5 | 930 | 0.- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 869 | 48.- |
2 | 799 | 49.- |
3 | 632 | 45.- |
4 | 619 | Sai- |
5 | 591 | 43.- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 609 | Sain- |
2 | 171 | Mont- |
3 | 104 | 48.4- |
4 | 103 | 48.3- |
5 | 101 | 48.5- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 605 | Saint- |
2 | 59 | Ville- |
3 | 49 | Jean-- |
4 | 48 | Andri- |
5 | 33 | Marie- |
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