Character usage in Chinese short message service (SMS): a real–world study in Mainland China. (4th October 2013)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Chen, Xi; Guo, Chenhui; Chau, Michael; Zhou, Weihua
• Is Part Of: International journal of mobile communications. Volume 11:Number 5(2013)
• Page Start: 429
• Page End: 445
• Publication Date: 2013-10-04
• Subjects: mobile communications -- Chinese SMS -- short message service -- character usage -- mobile services -- text mining -- China -- language usage patterns -- Chinese characters; Mobile communication systems -- Periodicals; Wireless communication systems -- Periodicals; 384.53
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1470-949X

Abstract

Short message service (SMS) is an important component of modern mobile services. Given unique characteristics of Chinese language, it is imperative to conduct study to understand characteristic of language usage patterns in Chinese SMS so that important facts like why and how people in China use SMS can be discovered. In this paper, we report an analysis of Chinese SMS logs from three different provinces in China. A computational approach was applied to extract n–grams from logs of SMS. The language usage patterns reported in this paper consist of two aspects: 1) most popular n–grams that represent what types of information were transmitted via SMS; 2) distribution of n–grams in comparison with Zipf laws. We discovered that, compared with other forms of free text in Chinese, SMS contains more conversational elements, which are expressed mostly in bigrams. Trigrams, 4– and 5–grams are less frequent but are closely connected to commercial activities, which may indicate the commercial needs of SMS users.