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

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;