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In many applications of natural language processing (NLP) it is necessary to determine the likelihood of a given word combination. For example, a speech recognizer may need to determine which of the two word combinations ``eat a peach'' and…
The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis proposes that speakers aim to distribute information evenly throughout a text, balancing production effort and listener comprehension difficulty. However, language typically does not maintain…
Recent analysis of social communications among humans has revealed that the interval between interactions for a pair of individuals and for an individual often follows a long-tail distribution. We investigate the effect of such a…
We make decisions by reacting to changes in the real world, in particular, the emergence and disappearance of impermanent entities such as events, restaurants, and services. Because we want to avoid missing out on opportunities or making…
We propose a new computational approach for tracking and detecting statistically significant linguistic shifts in the meaning and usage of words. Such linguistic shifts are especially prevalent on the Internet, where the rapid exchange of…
In this paper, we investigate the arising communication patterns on social media, and in particular the series of events happening for a single user. While the distribution of inter-event times is often assimilated to power-law density…
A theoretical framework is proposed for the understanding of verbal perception -- the conversion of words into meaning, modeled as a compromise between lexical demands and contextual constraints -- and the theory is tested against…
The syntactic structure of a sentence can be represented as a graph, where vertices are words and edges indicate syntactic dependencies between them. In this setting, the distance between two linked words is defined as the difference…
The dynamics of popularity in online media are driven by a combination of endogenous spreading mechanisms and response to exogenous shocks including news and events. However, little is known about the dependence of temporal patterns of…
The recent dramatic increase in online data availability has allowed researchers to explore human culture with unprecedented detail, such as the growth and diversification of language. In particular, it provides statistical tools to explore…
We consider words as a network of interacting letters, and approximate the probability distribution of states taken on by this network. Despite the intuition that the rules of English spelling are highly combinatorial (and arbitrary), we…
Micro-blogging systems such as Twitter expose digital traces of social discourse with an unprecedented degree of resolution of individual behaviors. They offer an opportunity to investigate how a large-scale social system responds to…
As suggested by Currie, we apply the probabilistic method to problems regarding pattern avoidance. Using techniques from analytic combinatorics, we calculate asymptotic pattern occurrence statistics and use them in conjunction with the…
Human engagement in narrative is partially driven by reasoning about discourse relations between narrative events, and the expectations about what is likely to happen next that results from such reasoning. Researchers in NLP have tackled…
The psycholinguistic theory of communication accommodation accounts for the general observation that participants in conversations tend to converge to one another's communicative behavior: they coordinate in a variety of dimensions…
With the rapid growth of online social media, people become increasingly overwhelmed by the volume and the content of the information present in the environment. The threshold model is currently one of the most common methods to capture the…
The global popularity of microblogs has led to an increasing accumulation of large volumes of text data on microblogging platforms such as Twitter. These corpora are untapped resources to understand social expressions on diverse subjects.…
We build models for the distribution of social states in Twitter communities. States can be defined by the participation vs silence of individuals in conversations that surround key words, and we approximate the joint distribution of these…
The dynamics of information dissemination in social networks is of paramount importance in processes such as rumors or fads propagation, spread of product innovations or "word-of-mouth" communications. Due to the difficulty in tracking a…
The boundaries between physical and social networks have narrowed with the advent of the Internet and its pervasive platforms. This has given rise to a complex adaptive information ecosystem where individuals and machines compete for…