word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 91369 | ו- |
2 | 70308 | ה- |
3 | 54137 | ש- |
4 | 52100 | מ- |
5 | 49036 | ב- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 18189 | וה- |
2 | 12059 | המ- |
3 | 11990 | ומ- |
4 | 10652 | שה- |
5 | 9890 | וב- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 2843 | והמ- |
2 | 2247 | כשה- |
3 | 1870 | ולה- |
4 | 1726 | והת- |
5 | 1651 | המו- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 394 | ולהת- |
2 | 360 | והמו- |
3 | 298 | www.- |
4 | 285 | ישרא- |
5 | 271 | כשהמ- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 266 | ישראל- |
2 | 144 | אנטי-- |
3 | 125 | האינט- |
4 | 122 | האנטי- |
5 | 109 | אינטר- |
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