word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 279662 | S- |
2 | 235925 | M- |
3 | 219930 | C- |
4 | 206608 | A- |
5 | 198600 | B- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 80950 | Ma- |
2 | 55338 | co- |
3 | 48148 | Ch- |
4 | 47291 | Co- |
5 | 44913 | re- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 33027 | www- |
2 | 20346 | Mar- |
3 | 17611 | pro- |
4 | 16198 | con- |
5 | 15987 | The- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 32947 | www.- |
2 | 13060 | http- |
3 | 11621 | non-- |
4 | 11120 | The- |
5 | 7548 | anti- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 10280 | http:- |
2 | 6329 | anti-- |
3 | 5188 | John- |
4 | 4630 | inter- |
5 | 4621 | Chris- |
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