Related papers: Universal Complex Structures in Written Language
Taylor's law describes the fluctuation characteristics underlying a system in which the variance of an event within a time span grows by a power law with respect to the mean. Although Taylor's law has been applied in many natural and social…
In this work we analyze statistical properties of 91 relatively small texts in 7 different languages (Spanish, English, French, German, Turkish, Russian, Icelandic) as well as texts with randomly inserted spaces. Despite the size (around…
In [arXiv:1404.1461], Yan and Minnhagen argue that the scaling law for the text-length dependence of word-frequency distributions proposed in [New J. Phys. 15 093033, arXiv:1303.0705] is "fundamentally incorrect" and "fundamentally…
In this paper we quantify the statistical properties and dynamics of the frequency of hashtag use on Twitter. Hashtags are special words used in social media to attract attention and to organize content. Looking at the collection of all…
Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words which are combined to form phrases. We show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a…
Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A…
Inverse power-law interaction forms, such as the inverse-square law, recur across a wide range of physical, social, and spatial systems. While traditionally derived from specific microscopic mechanisms, the ubiquity of these laws suggests a…
When the probability of measuring a particular value of some quantity varies inversely as a power of that value, the quantity is said to follow a power law, also known variously as Zipf's law or the Pareto distribution. Power laws appear…
Zipf's law is shown to arise as the variational solution of a problem formulated in Fisher's terms. An appropriate minimization process involving Fisher information and scale-invariance yields this universal rank distribution. As an example…
A family of information theoretic models of communication was introduced more than a decade ago to explain the origins of Zipf's law for word frequencies. The family is a based on a combination of two information theoretic principles:…
The word embedding space in neural models is skewed, and correcting this can improve task performance. We point out that most approaches for modeling, correcting, and measuring the symmetry of an embedding space implicitly assume that the…
A plethora of natural and socio-economic phenomena share a striking statistical regularity, that is the magnitude of elements decreases with a power law as a function of their position in a ranking of magnitude. Such regularity is known as…
We explore a probabilistic model of an artistic text: words of the text are chosen independently of each other in accordance with a discrete probability distribution on an infinite dictionary. The words are enumerated 1, 2, $\ldots$, and…
Linguistic laws constitute one of the quantitative cornerstones of modern cognitive sciences and have been routinely investigated in written corpora, or in the equivalent transcription of oral corpora. This means that inferences of…
This paper studies the limits of language models' statistical learning in the context of Zipf's law. First, we demonstrate that Zipf-law token distribution emerges irrespective of the chosen tokenization. Second, we show that Zipf…
Natural language exhibits various universal properties. But why do these universals exist? One explanation is that they arise from functional pressures to achieve efficient communication, a view which attributes cross-linguistic properties…
A key aim in biology and psychology is to identify fundamental principles underpinning the behavior of animals, including humans. Analyses of human language and the behavior of a range of non-human animal species have provided evidence for…
Statistical properties of the taxonomic classification of human languages are studied. It is shown that, at the highest levels of the taxonomic hierarchy, the frequency of taxon members as a function of the number of languages belonging to…
This study presents a fascinating linguistic property related to the number of letters in words and their corresponding numerical values. By selecting any arbitrary word, counting its constituent letters, and subsequently spelling out the…
The interaction of all mobile species with their environment hinges on their movement patterns: the places they visit and how frequently they go there. In human society, where the prevalent form of cohabitation is in cities, the highly…