Recoding of natural language for economy of transmission or storage
James Gerard Wolff · The Computer Journal · 1978
A computer program, developed as a psychological model of speed segmentation (Wolff, 1975), is presented as a method of recoding natural language for economical storage or transmission. The program builds a dictionary of frequently occurring letter strings. Where these strings occur in a text they may be replaced by a short code, thus effecting a compression of up to 49%. The strings may also be used as key ‘words’ in a document retrieval system. The method has the particular merit of simplicity in building the dictionary and efficiency in encoding data.