word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 16766 | م- |
2 | 14121 | ا- |
3 | 11503 | ب- |
4 | 8127 | ن- |
5 | 7449 | ت- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 2359 | با- |
2 | 2201 | مي- |
3 | 2090 | می- |
4 | 1926 | بر- |
5 | 1916 | ال- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 1319 | مي- |
2 | 1118 | می- |
3 | 954 | است- |
4 | 696 | باز- |
5 | 622 | کار- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 333 | نمي- |
2 | 315 | نمی- |
3 | 197 | نانو- |
4 | 196 | اقتص- |
5 | 181 | استا- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 195 | اقتصا- |
2 | 125 | ایران- |
3 | 108 | الکتر- |
4 | 105 | بازار- |
5 | 103 | نیوز:- |
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