English

On the nature of long-range letter correlations in texts

Computation and Language 2016-11-27 v1 Information Theory math.IT

Abstract

The origin of long-range letter correlations in natural texts is studied using random walk analysis and Jensen-Shannon divergence. It is concluded that they result from slow variations in letter frequency distribution, which are a consequence of slow variations in lexical composition within the text. These correlations are preserved by random letter shuffling within a moving window. As such, they do reflect structural properties of the text, but in a very indirect manner.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0809.0103,
  title  = {On the nature of long-range letter correlations in texts},
  author = {Dmitrii Y. Manin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0809.0103},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

14 pages, 5 figures, unpublished