Related papers: Beyond Zipf's law: Modeling the structure of human…
Human languages employ constructions that tacitly assume specific properties of the limited range of phenomena they evolved to describe. These assumed properties are true features of that limited context, but may not be general or precise…
Complex network theory is used to investigate the structure of meaningful concepts in written texts of individual authors. Networks have been constructed after a two phase filtering, where words with less meaning contents are eliminated,…
The organization and evolution of science has recently become itself an object of scientific quantitative investigation, thanks to the wealth of information that can be extracted from scientific documents, such as citations between papers…
Systems for language understanding have become remarkably strong at overcoming linguistic imperfections in tasks involving phrase matching or simple reasoning. Yet, their accuracy drops dramatically as the number of reasoning steps…
The success of neural networks on a diverse set of NLP tasks has led researchers to question how much these networks actually ``know'' about natural language. Probes are a natural way of assessing this. When probing, a researcher chooses a…
Words in natural language follow a Zipfian distribution whereby some words are frequent but most are rare. Learning representations for words in the "long tail" of this distribution requires enormous amounts of data. Representations of rare…
Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have produced general models that can perform complex tasks such as summarizing long passages and translating across languages. Here, we introduce a method to extract adjective…
Complex systems, such as life and languages, are governed by principles of evolution. The analogy and comparison between biology and linguistics\cite{alphafold2, RoseTTAFold, lang_virus, cell language, faculty1, language of gene, Protein…
How universal is human conceptual structure? The way concepts are organized in the human brain may reflect distinct features of cultural, historical, and environmental background in addition to properties universal to human cognition.…
Large language models generate text through probabilistic sampling from high-dimensional distributions, yet how this process reshapes the structural statistical organization of language remains incompletely characterized. Here we show that…
Some authors have recently argued that a finite-size scaling law for the text-length dependence of word-frequency distributions cannot be conceptually valid. Here we give solid quantitative evidence for the validity of such scaling law,…
Zipf's, Heaps' and Taylor's laws are ubiquitous in many different systems where innovation processes are at play. Together, they represent a compelling set of stylized facts regarding the overall statistics, the innovation rate and the…
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…
Physics seeks to uncover the laws of Nature and express them through mathematical equations. Despite the vast diversity of natural phenomena, physical equations exhibit structural regularities that set them apart from arbitrary mathematical…
There is growing interest in studying the languages that emerge when neural agents are jointly trained to solve tasks requiring communication through a discrete channel. We investigate here the information-theoretic complexity of such…
Recent studies have investigated siamese network architectures for learning invariant speech representations using same-different side information at the word level. Here we investigate systematically an often ignored component of siamese…
Research in linguistics has shown that humans can read words with internally scrambled letters, a phenomenon recently dubbed typoglycemia. Some specific NLP models have recently been proposed that similarly demonstrate robustness to such…
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…
Language is crucial for human intelligence, but what exactly is its role? We take language to be a part of a system for understanding and communicating about situations. The human ability to understand and communicate about situations…
Large Language Models are useless for linguistics, as they are probabilistic models that require a vast amount of data to analyse externalized strings of words. In contrast, human language is underpinned by a mind-internal computational…