A Note on Prediction and Entropy of Bengali Prose

Abstract

The concept of entropy has been used to study the statistical structure of various languages for long. A similar study is made for printed Bengali prose. Using the proportions of letters estimated from a large sample of Bengali prose, an optimum code is constructed for the letters of the Bengali alphabet. The unbiased estimates of one-gram entropies of different forms of prose writings are obtained. An estimate is made, experimentally, of the lower and upper bounds of the entropy of Bengali prose. Different Indian languages and English have been compared for their values of entropy.