Title: Character usage in Chinese short message service (SMS): a real-world study in Mainland China

Authors: Xi Chen; Chenhui Guo; Michael Chau; Weihua Zhou

Addresses: School of Management, Department of Management Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Administration Tower 1001, Zi Jin Gang Campus, Hangzhou, China ' Department of Management Information Systems, The University of Arizona, McClelland Hall 430, 1130 E. Helen Street, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA ' School of Business, Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong ' School of Management, Department of Management Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Administration Tower 1001, Zi Jin Gang Campus, Hangzhou, China

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.

Keywords: mobile communications; Chinese SMS; short message service; character usage; mobile services; text mining; China; language usage patterns; Chinese characters.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMC.2013.056954

International Journal of Mobile Communications, 2013 Vol.11 No.5, pp.429 - 445

Published online: 03 Oct 2013 *

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