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Frequency, Informativity and Word Length: Insights from Typologically Diverse Corpora
1Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Entropy (Basel, Switzerland)
|February 25, 2022
Summary
Zipf's law of abbreviation suggests shorter words are more frequent. This study finds word length correlates differently with informativity across languages, influenced by noun phrase structure and orthography.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Computational Linguistics
- Corpus Linguistics
Background:
- Zipf's law of abbreviation notes a negative correlation between word frequency and length.
- Contextual informativity shows a stronger, yet inconsistent, correlation with word length.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the relationship between word length, frequency, and informativity across a diverse language sample.
- To explore how linguistic features like noun phrase structure and orthography influence these correlations.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of large web corpora (Leipzig Corpora Collection) for seven languages: Arabic, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.
- Estimation of word length (UTF-8 characters, phonemes), word frequency, and contextual informativity (using bigram processing).
Main Results:
- Observed varying correlations between word length and informativity measures across the studied languages.
- Identified noun phrase properties (head-modifier order, morphological complexity) and orthographic conventions as key explanatory factors for cross-linguistic differences.
Conclusions:
- The relationship between word length and informativity is not universal and is modulated by language-specific structural and orthographic features.
- Noun phrase typology plays a significant role in shaping word length and informativity patterns.
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