Distribution and characteristics of commonly used words across different texts in Japanese
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Makoto Yamazaki
Abstract
In this chapter, I survey the frequency distribution of commonly used words across different texts in Japanese. Using the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese, we examined the distribution. The results show the following. (1) The distribution draws a curve similar to Zipf’s law, but the curve always begins to increase shortly before the degree of commonality reaches its maximum, (2) neither the length nor the number of the texts affects the distribution trend, (3) as the text length increases, the number of commonly used words also increases linearly, but it reaches a maximum point due to the limited number of basic words.
Abstract
In this chapter, I survey the frequency distribution of commonly used words across different texts in Japanese. Using the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese, we examined the distribution. The results show the following. (1) The distribution draws a curve similar to Zipf’s law, but the curve always begins to increase shortly before the degree of commonality reaches its maximum, (2) neither the length nor the number of the texts affects the distribution trend, (3) as the text length increases, the number of commonly used words also increases linearly, but it reaches a maximum point due to the limited number of basic words.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Part I. Theory and models 7
- On the impact of the initial phrase length on the position of enclitics in Old Czech 9
- Term distance, frequency and collocations 21
- A method for the comparison of general sequences via type-token ratio 37
- Quantitative analysis of syllable properties in Croatian, Serbian, Russian, and Ukrainian 55
- N -grams of grammatical functions and their significant order in the Japanese clause 69
- Linking the dependents 93
- Grammar efficiency and the One-Meaning–One-Form Principle 109
- Distribution and characteristics of commonly used words across different texts in Japanese 121
- Part II. Empirical studies 135
- The perils of big data 137
- From distinguishability to informativity 145
- A Modern Greek readability tool 163
- Phonological properties as predictors of text success 177
- Calculating the victory chances 195
- Topological mapping for visualisation of high-dimensional historical linguistic data 209
- Book genre and author’s gender recognition based on titles 225
- Quantitative analysis of bibliographic corpora 239
- Analysis of English text genre classification based on dependency types 257
- In memory of Gabriel Altmann 271
- Index 277
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Part I. Theory and models 7
- On the impact of the initial phrase length on the position of enclitics in Old Czech 9
- Term distance, frequency and collocations 21
- A method for the comparison of general sequences via type-token ratio 37
- Quantitative analysis of syllable properties in Croatian, Serbian, Russian, and Ukrainian 55
- N -grams of grammatical functions and their significant order in the Japanese clause 69
- Linking the dependents 93
- Grammar efficiency and the One-Meaning–One-Form Principle 109
- Distribution and characteristics of commonly used words across different texts in Japanese 121
- Part II. Empirical studies 135
- The perils of big data 137
- From distinguishability to informativity 145
- A Modern Greek readability tool 163
- Phonological properties as predictors of text success 177
- Calculating the victory chances 195
- Topological mapping for visualisation of high-dimensional historical linguistic data 209
- Book genre and author’s gender recognition based on titles 225
- Quantitative analysis of bibliographic corpora 239
- Analysis of English text genre classification based on dependency types 257
- In memory of Gabriel Altmann 271
- Index 277
