Word-length entropies and correlations of natural language written texts
Computation and Language
2014-01-27 v1 Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Abstract
We study the frequency distributions and correlations of the word lengths of ten European languages. Our findings indicate that a) the word-length distribution of short words quantified by the mean value and the entropy distinguishes the Uralic (Finnish) corpus from the others, b) the tails at long words, manifested in the high-order moments of the distributions, differentiate the Germanic languages (except for English) from the Romanic languages and Greek and c) the correlations between nearby word lengths measured by the comparison of the real entropies with those of the shuffled texts are found to be smaller in the case of Germanic and Finnish languages.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1401.6224,
title = {Word-length entropies and correlations of natural language written texts},
author = {Maria Kalimeri and Vassilios Constantoudis and Constantinos Papadimitriou and Konstantinos Karamanos and Fotis K. Diakonos and Harris Papageorgiou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1401.6224},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
13 pages + 1 page of supporting information, 9 figures