CMSC 380: Science of Information
Programming Assignment#1

Due on Tuesday: September 25, 2012.

Write a program to process a large text as if it were an information source. Treating the letters of alphabet as symbols (ignore all other characters), compute the following:

• A table and plot of the letter frequencies.
• Use above to compute the entropy of the text.
• The top ten most frequent first letters in words in the text.
• The top ten most frequent last letters in words in the text.
• The top ten most frequent bigrams/digraphs (2-letter combinations) in the text.

Extra Credit: Do all of the above for text(s) in other languages (German, French, Italian, Spanish, ...)

Hand in a written report containing the following:

Details of the text: Title, Author, etc. Identify the source of the text (where you obtained the data file). And all of the above data obtained by your program. Include the documented program source at the end of your report.

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