How to Measure Word Length in Spoken and Written Chinese

A Quantitative Study on Dream of the Red Chamber: Word‐Length Distribution and Authorship Attribution

“…e inconsistency may be due to the difference in units of measurement used, as in their study, the researchers took components as the unit of measurement, while in the present study, we take syllable/ character as the unit of measurement. Chen and Liu [29] point out that the most appropriate unit of measurement for written Chinese are components. " e component is the constructing units of characters which have more than one stroke" [29]:10).…”

“…e frequency distribution of words with different lengths would not be chaotic but follow specific rules. Moreover, two families of distributional models, Poisson and binomial, could fit most previously studied human languages [29]. Although much ink has been spilled on the topic of WLD, much of the work has been conducted on Indo-European languages.…”

“…Although much ink has been spilled on the topic of WLD, much of the work has been conducted on Indo-European languages. ere has been less focus on Chinese, except for the recent studies by Wang [30], Chen [31], Chen and Liu [29],and so on.…”

Testing the Menzerath-Altmann Law in the Sentence Level of Written Chinese

“…Language levels and language units are critical conceptions in a language system, and they are highly related with the entities in a language, as well as the methods used [1] [2]. Generally, five language units are recognized by grammarians: morpheme, word, phrase, clause and sentence [3].…”

Quantifying Evolution of Short and Long‐Range Correlations in Chinese Narrative Texts across 2000 Years

“…Köhler [15] points out that word length may reflect the properties of its basic language units-words. Many recent researches have been devoted to word length distributions in texts [16,17], such as the famous Zipf 's law of word length distribution. However most of them are concerned with words per se.…”