Related papers: A New Look at the Classical Entropy of Written Eng…
The entropy rate of printed English is famously estimated to be about one bit per character, a benchmark that modern large language models (LLMs) have only recently approached. This entropy rate implies that English contains nearly 80…
Beyond the local constraints imposed by grammar, words concatenated in long sequences carrying a complex message show statistical regularities that may reflect their linguistic role in the message. In this paper, we perform a systematic…
Shannon entropy is often a quantity of interest to linguists studying the communicative capacity of human language. However, entropy must typically be estimated from observed data because researchers do not have access to the underlying…
In natural language processing, the entropy of a language is a measure of its unpredictability and complexity. The first study on this subject was conducted by Claude Shannon in 1951. By having participants predict the next character in a…
Calculating the Shannon entropy for symbolic sequences has been widely considered in many fields. For descriptive statistical problems such as estimating the N-gram entropy of English language text, a common approach is to use as much data…
This paper reports on results on the entropy of the Spanish language. They are based on an analysis of natural language for n-word symbols (n = 1 to 18), trigrams, digrams, and characters. The results obtained in this work are based on the…
This paper introduces an objective metric for evaluating a parsing scheme. It is based on Shannon's original work with letter sequences, which can be extended to part-of-speech tag sequences. It is shown that this regular language is an…
In Shannon's seminal paper, entropy of printed English, treated as a stationary stochastic process, was estimated to be roughly 1 bit per character. However, considered as a means of communication, language differs considerably from its…
We study the entropy of Chinese and English texts, based on characters in case of Chinese texts and based on words for both languages. Significant differences are found between the languages and between different personal styles of debating…
We use large language models (LLMs) to uncover long-ranged structure in English texts from a variety of sources. The conditional entropy or code length in many cases continues to decrease with context length at least to $N\sim 10^4$…
Understanding the complexity of human language requires an appropriate analysis of the statistical distribution of words in texts. We consider the information retrieval problem of detecting and ranking the relevant words of a text by means…
The problem of Shannon entropy estimation in countable infinite alphabets is addressed from the study and use of convergence results of the entropy functional, which is known to be discontinuous with respect to the total variation distance…
We discuss algorithms for estimating the Shannon entropy h of finite symbol sequences with long range correlations. In particular, we consider algorithms which estimate h from the code lengths produced by some compression algorithm. Our…
The average uncertainty associated with words is an information-theoretic concept at the heart of quantitative and computational linguistics. The entropy has been established as a measure of this average uncertainty - also called average…
This paper addresses the problem of determining the distance between two regular languages. It will show how to expand Jaccard distance, which works on finite sets, to potentially-infinite regular languages. The entropy of a regular…
We compared entropy for texts written in natural languages (English, Spanish) and artificial languages (computer software) based on a simple expression for the entropy as a function of message length and specific word diversity. Code text…
I consider the effect of a finite sample size on the entropy of a sample of independent events. I propose formula for entropy which satisfies Shannon's axioms, and which reduces to Shannon's entropy when sample size is infinite. I discuss…
We propose a compression-based version of the empirical entropy of a finite string over a finite alphabet. Whereas previously one considers the naked entropy of (possibly higher order) Markov processes, we consider the sum of the…
Entropy has been a common index to quantify the complexity of time series in a variety of fields. Here, we introduce increment entropy to measure the complexity of time series in which each increment is mapped into a word of two letters,…
The problem addressed concerns the determination of the average number of successive attempts of guessing a word of a certain length consisting of letters with given probabilities of occurrence. Both first- and second-order approximations…