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Quantifying regularities in behavioral dynamics is of crucial interest for understanding collective social events such as panics or political revolutions. With the widespread use of digital communication media it has become possible to…
As is the case of many signals produced by complex systems, language presents a statistical structure that is balanced between order and disorder. Here we review and extend recent results from quantitative characterisations of the degree of…
Many words in documents recur very frequently but are essentially meaningless as they are used to join words together in a sentence. It is commonly understood that stop words do not contribute to the context or content of textual documents.…
Though languages can evolve slowly, they can also react strongly to dramatic world events. By studying the connection between words and events, it is possible to identify which events change our vocabulary and in what way. In this work, we…
The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis posits that speakers tend to distribute information evenly across linguistic units to achieve efficient communication. Of course, information rate in texts and discourses is not perfectly…
Our paper studies the predictability of online speech -- that is, how well language models learn to model the distribution of user generated content on X (previously Twitter). We define predictability as a measure of the model's…
We studied the time interval between posting social media content and search action related to seasonal topics. The analysis was performed using a mathematical model of the search behavior as in the theory of sociophysics. As seasonal…
For the purposes of computational dialectology or other geographically bound text analysis tasks, texts must be annotated with their or their authors' location. Many texts are locatable through explicit labels but most have no explicit…
Consider a person trying to spread an important message on a social network. He/she can spend hours trying to craft the message. Does it actually matter? While there has been extensive prior work looking into predicting popularity of…
In many applications, ideas that are described by a set of words often flow between different groups. To facilitate users in analyzing the flow, we present a method to model the flow behaviors that aims at identifying the lead-lag…
The world is evolving and so is the vocabulary used to discuss topics in speech. Analysing political speech data from more than 30 years requires the use of flexible topic models to uncover the latent topics and their change in prevalence…
Bayesian inference systems should be able to explain their reasoning to users, translating from numerical to natural language. Previous empirical work has investigated the correspondence between absolute probabilities and linguistic…
We point out that the functional form describing the frequency of sizes of events in complex systems (e.g. earthquakes, forest fires, bursts of neuronal activity) can be obtained from maximal likelihood inference, which, remarkably, only…
From a grammar point of view, the role of punctuation marks in a sentence is formally defined and well understood. In semantic analysis punctuation plays also a crucial role as a method of avoiding ambiguity of the meaning. A different…
In our modern society, people are daily confronted with an increasing amount of information of any kind. As a consequence, the attention capacities and processing abilities of individuals often saturate. People, therefore, have to select…
Arrival times of requests to print in a student laboratory were analyzed. Inter-arrival times between subsequent requests follow a universal scaling law relating time intervals and the size of the request, indicating a scale invariant…
Quantitative linguistics has provided us with a number of empirical laws that characterise the evolution of languages and competition amongst them. In terms of language usage, one of the most influential results is Zipf's law of word…
Due to its popularity and availability, social media data may present a new way to identify individuals who are experiencing mental illness. By analysing blog content, this study aimed to investigate the associations between linguistic…
In the process of information gathering on the web, confirmation bias is known to exist, exemplified in phenomena such as echo chambers and filter bubbles. Our purpose is to reveal how people consume news and discuss these phenomena. In web…
Statistical studies of languages have focused on the rank-frequency distribution of words. Instead, we introduce here a measure of how word ranks change in time and call this distribution \emph{rank diversity}. We calculate this diversity…