Monthly Archives: April 2011

Zipfy n-grams

Posted on 28 April 2011 by Brian Hayes

In the 1930s and 40s George Kingsley Zipf studied word frequencies in several languages and came up with a general observation: If you sort all the words from commonest to rarest, the frequency of the word at rank r is … Continue reading →

Posted in computing, linguistics | 10 Comments

The Library of Babble

Posted on 23 April 2011 by Brian Hayes

The new issue of American Scientist is out, both on newsstands and on the web. My “Computing Science” column takes up a topic I’ve already written about here on bit-player: the huge corpus of “n-grams” extracted from the Google Books … Continue reading →

Posted in computing, linguistics | 9 Comments

Rashid’s bits

Posted on 10 April 2011 by Brian Hayes

I’m in Pittsburgh this weekend, attending a conference at Carnegie Mellon University. The sessions are being held in the Rashid Auditorium of the Gates Building. The seats in the auditorium are upholstered with a pattern that seems apt for a … Continue reading →

Posted in computing, mathematics | 17 Comments