Character usage in Chinese short message service (SMS): a real-world study in Mainland China Online publication date: Thu, 03-Oct-2013
by Xi Chen; Chenhui Guo; Michael Chau; Weihua Zhou
International Journal of Mobile Communications (IJMC), Vol. 11, No. 5, 2013
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.
Existing subscribers:
Go to Inderscience Online Journals to access the Full Text of this article.
If you are not a subscriber and you just want to read the full contents of this article, buy online access here.Complimentary Subscribers, Editors or Members of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Mobile Communications (IJMC):
Login with your Inderscience username and password:
Want to subscribe?
A subscription gives you complete access to all articles in the current issue, as well as to all articles in the previous three years (where applicable). See our Orders page to subscribe.
If you still need assistance, please email subs@inderscience.com
Our Blog 
Follow us on Twitter 
Visit us on Facebook