word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 8742 | 1- |
2 | 5527 | 2- |
3 | 3769 | S- |
4 | 3330 | 3- |
5 | 3206 | C- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 1141 | 10- |
2 | 1089 | 20- |
3 | 1016 | 11- |
4 | 852 | 19- |
5 | 851 | 12- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 321 | 200- |
2 | 298 | 201- |
3 | 240 | 600- |
4 | 166 | 第11- |
5 | 164 | 100- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 160 | 2011- |
2 | 66 | 穆里尼奥- |
3 | 65 | Inte- |
4 | 58 | 第110- |
5 | 57 | 第111- |
word rank | frequency | n-gram |
---|---|---|
1 | 44 | Power- |
2 | 42 | Super- |
3 | 42 | iPhon- |
4 | 39 | Googl- |
5 | 39 | 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