Related papers: Universal Complex Structures in Written Language
A series of phenomena pertaining to economics, quantum physics, language, literary criticism, and especially architecture is studied from the standpoint of synergetics (the study of self-organizing complex systems). It turns out that a…
For words, rank-frequency distributions have long been heralded for adherence to a potentially-universal phenomenon known as Zipf's law. The hypothetical form of this empirical phenomenon was refined by Ben\^{i}ot Mandelbrot to that which…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
Time evolution of the cities and of the languages is considered in terms of multiplicative noise and fragmentation processes; where power law (Pareto-Zipf law) and slightly asymmetric log-normal (Gauss) distribution result for the size…
If a concept is not well defined, there are grounds for its abuse. This is particularly true of complexity, an inherently interdisciplinary concept that has penetrated very different fields of intellectual activity from physics to…
The joint probability distribution of many degrees of freedom in biological systems, such as firing patterns in neural networks or antibody sequence composition in zebrafish, often follow Zipf's law, where a power law is observed on a…
The spatial distribution of people exhibits clustering across a wide range of scales, from household ($\sim 10^{-2}$ km) to continental ($\sim 10^4$ km) scales. Empirical data indicates simple power-law scalings for the size distribution of…
We show that the Zipf's law for Chinese characters perfectly holds for sufficiently short texts (few thousand different characters). The scenario of its validity is similar to the Zipf's law for words in short English texts. For long…
A new angle of view is proposed to find the simple rules dominating complex systems and regular patterns behind random phenomena such as cities. Hierarchy of cities reflects the ubiquitous structure frequently observed in the natural world…
Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across…
We model certain features of human language complexity by means of advanced concepts borrowed from statistical mechanics. Using a time series approach, the diffusion entropy method (DE), we compute the complexity of an Italian corpus of…
We consider questions related to the structure of infinite words (over an integer alphabet) with bounded additive complexity, i.e., words with the property that the number of distinct sums exhibited by factors of the same length is bounded…
We review recent progress in understanding the meaning of mutual information in natural language. Let us define words in a text as strings that occur sufficiently often. In a few previous papers, we have shown that a power-law distribution…
The task of text segmentation may be undertaken at many levels in text analysis---paragraphs, sentences, words, or even letters. Here, we focus on a relatively fine scale of segmentation, hypothesizing it to be in accord with a stochastic…
The article discusses the frequency of characters of Oracle,concluding that the frequency and the rank of a word or character is fit to Zipf-Mandelboit Law or Zipf's law with three parameters,and figuring out the parameters based on the…
We model the generation of words with independent unequal probabilities of occurrence of letters. We prove that the probability $p(r)$ of occurrence of words of rank $r$ has a power asymptotics. As distinct from the paper published earlier…
Background: Zipf's law and Heaps' law are two representatives of the scaling concepts, which play a significant role in the study of complexity science. The coexistence of the Zipf's law and the Heaps' law motivates different understandings…
It has been claimed that within a language, morphologically irregular words are more likely to be phonotactically simple and morphologically regular words are more likely to be phonotactically complex. This inverse correlation has been…
Quantitative linguistics has been allowed, in the last few decades, within the admittedly blurry boundaries of the field of complex systems. A growing host of applied mathematicians and statistical physicists devote their efforts to…
We introduce a simple and generic model that reproduces Zipf's law. By regarding the time evolution of the model as a random walk in the logarithmic scale, we explain theoretically why this model reproduces Zipf's law. The explanation shows…