Patterns in the word length distribution of synonymous words in the English language

Authors

Jessica T. Nasayao ⋅ PH National Institute of Physics, University of the Philippines Diliman
Christian M. Alis ⋅ GB Department of Physics and Astronomy, University College of London
May T. Lim ⋅ PH National Institute of Physics, University of the Philippines Diliman

Abstract

Utterance lengths in both fictional and online conversations are gradually shortening through time. One possible cause of shortening is the replacement of words by shorter synonyms. In this work, we analyze patterns in frequencies of words found in WordNet by getting their occurrences from the Google Books N-gram corpus. For sixty-nine percent (69%) of the unambiguous words in the WordNet dataset, the usage of words with shorter lengths rapidly increase after coinage and eventually becomes the most preferred word over its longer synonyms.

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Issue

2015: Proceedings of the 33rd Samahang Pisika ng Pilipinas Physics Congress

Article ID

SPP-2015-PA-36

Section

Poster Session PA

Published

2015-06-03

How to Cite

[1]

JT Nasayao, CM Alis, and MT Lim, Patterns in the word length distribution of synonymous words in the English language, Proceedings of the Samahang Pisika ng Pilipinas 33, SPP-2015-PA-36 (2015). URL: https://proceedings.spp-online.org/article/view/1192.