Distribution of content words and phrases in text and language modelling

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of distribution of words and phrases in text, a problem of great general interest and of importance for many practical applications. The existing models for word distribution present observed sequences of words in text documents as an outcome of some stochastic processes; the corresponding distributions of numbers of word occurrences in the documents are modelled as mixtures of Poisson distributions whose parameter values are fitted to the data. We pursue a linguistically motivated approach to statistical language modelling and use observable text characteristics as model parameters. Multi-word technical terms, intrinsically content entities, are chosen for experimentation. Their occurrence and the occurrence dynamics are investigated using a 100-million word data collection consisting of a variety of about 13,000 technical documents. The derivation of models describing word distribution in text is based on a linguistic interpretation of the process of text formation, with the probabilities of word occurrence being functions of observable and linguistically meaningful text characteristics. The adequacy of the proposed models for the description of actually observed distributions of words and phrases in text is confirmed experimentally. The paper has two focuses: one is modelling of the distributions of content words and phrases among different documents; and another is word occurrence dynamics within documents and estimation of corresponding probabilities. Accordingly, among the application areas for the new modelling paradigm are information retrieval and speech recognition.