Abstract

GUERRERO, FABIO G.. On the Entropy of Written Spanish. Rev.Colomb.Estad. [online]. 2012, vol.35, n.3, pp.425-442. ISSN 0120-1751.

A discussion on the entropy of the Spanish language by means of a practical method for calculating the entropy of a text by direct computer processing is presented. As an example of application, thirty samples of Spanish text are analyzed, totaling 22.8 million characters. Symbol lengths from n = 1 to 500 were considered for both words and characters. Both direct computer processing and the probability law of large numbers were employed for calculating the probability distribution of the symbols. An empirical relation on entropy involving the length of the text (in characters) and the number of different words in the text is presented. Statistical properties of the Spanish language when viewed as produced by a stochastic source, (such as origin shift invariance, ergodicity and asymptotic equipartition property) are also analyzed.

Keywords : Law of large numbers; Shannon entropy; Stochastic process; Zipf's law.

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