Quantitative Entropy Study of Language Complexity

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the entropy of Chinese and English texts to measure language complexity, revealing differences across languages, styles, and ages, with potential applications in personal and group linguistic analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a quantitative entropy-based method to compare language complexity across languages, styles, and demographic groups.

Findings

Chinese texts have different entropy levels than English.

Personal styles influence language entropy.

Entropy analysis can track language complexity over age and groups.

Abstract

We study the entropy of Chinese and English texts, based on characters in case of Chinese texts and based on words for both languages. Significant differences are found between the languages and between different personal styles of debating partners. The entropy analysis points in the direction of lower entropy, that is of higher complexity. Such a text analysis would be applied for individuals of different styles, a single individual at different age, as well as different groups of the population.