Related papers: Punctuation effects in English and Esperanto texts
The average predictability (aka informativity) of a word in context has been shown to condition word duration (Seyfarth, 2014). All else being equal, words that tend to occur in more predictable environments are shorter than words that tend…
We present a theoretical and empirical investigation of the statistical behaviour of the words in a text produced by human language. To this aim, we analyse the word distribution of various texts of Italian language selected from a specific…
Which statistical features distinguish a meaningful text (possibly written in an unknown system) from a meaningless set of symbols? Here we answer this question by comparing features of the first half of a text to its second half. This…
The distribution of frequency counts of distinct words by length in a language's vocabulary will be analyzed using two methods. The first, will look at the empirical distributions of several languages and derive a distribution that…
Argumentation is a formalism allowing to reason with contradictory information by modeling arguments and their interactions. There are now an increasing number of gradual semantics and impact measures that have emerged to facilitate the…
Quantum information has suggested new forms of quantum logic, called quantum computational logics, where meanings of sentences are represented by pieces of quantum information (generally, density operators of some Hilbert spaces), which can…
The exponential growth in the number of scientific papers makes it increasingly difficult for researchers to keep track of all the publications relevant to their work. Consequently, the attention that can be devoted to individual papers,…
Over the past two decades, numerous studies have demonstrated how less predictable (i.e., higher surprisal) words take more time to read. In general, these studies have implicitly assumed the reading process is purely responsive: Readers…
The interpretation of the lexical aspect of verbs in English plays a crucial role for recognizing textual entailment and learning discourse-level inferences. We show that two elementary dimensions of aspectual class, states vs. events, and…
Hidden structural patterns in written texts have been subject of considerable research in the last decades. In particular, mapping a text into a time series of sentence lengths is a natural way to investigate text structure. Typically,…
Analyzing the pattern of semantic variation in long real-world texts such as books or transcripts is interesting from the stylistic, cognitive, and linguistic perspectives. It is also useful for applications such as text segmentation,…
A theoretical framework is proposed for the understanding of verbal perception -- the conversion of words into meaning, modeled as a compromise between lexical demands and contextual constraints -- and the theory is tested against…
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…
Literary texts are usually rich in meanings and their interpretation complicates corpus studies and automatic processing. There have been several attempts to create collections of literary texts with annotation of literary elements like the…
Treebanks traditionally treat punctuation marks as ordinary words, but linguists have suggested that a tree's "true" punctuation marks are not observed (Nunberg, 1990). These latent "underlying" marks serve to delimit or separate…
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…
We describe an approach to robust domain-independent syntactic parsing of unrestricted naturally-occurring (English) input. The technique involves parsing sequences of part-of-speech and punctuation labels using a unification-based grammar…
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…
Contextual entropy is a psycholinguistic measure capturing the anticipated difficulty of processing a word just before it is encountered. Recent studies have tested for entropy-related effects as a potential complement to well-known effects…
Statistics pedagogy values using a variety of examples. Thanks to text resources on the Web, and since statistical packages have the ability to analyze string data, it is now easy to use language-based examples in a statistics class. Three…