Related papers: Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Us…
Ultraslow diffusion (i.e. logarithmic diffusion) has been extensively studied theoretically, but has hardly been observed empirically. In this paper, firstly, we find the ultraslow-like diffusion of the time-series of word counts of already…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
Infants gradually learn to parse continuous speech into words and connect names with objects, yet the mechanisms behind development of early word perception skills remain unknown. We studied the extent to which early words can be acquired…
Word embeddings are a powerful approach for unsupervised analysis of language. Recently, Rudolph et al. (2016) developed exponential family embeddings, which cast word embeddings in a probabilistic framework. Here, we develop dynamic…
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…
We propose a stochastic model to study phonetic changes as an evolutionary process driven by social interactions between two groups of individuals with different phonological systems. Particularly, we focus on the changes in the place of…
Stretched words like `heellllp' or `heyyyyy' are a regular feature of spoken language, often used to emphasize or exaggerate the underlying meaning of the root word. While stretched words are rarely found in formal written language and…
In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf formulated a couple of statistical laws on the relationship between the frequency of a word with its number of meanings: the law of meaning distribution, relating the frequency of a word and its…
In terminology work, natural language processing, and digital humanities, several studies address the analysis of variations in context and meaning of terms in order to detect semantic change and the evolution of terms. We distinguish three…
If a cultural feature is transmitted over generations and exposed to stochastic selection when spreading in a population, its evolution may be governed by statistical laws and be partly predictable, as in the case of genetic evolution.…
The present study uses a computational approach to examine the role of semantic constraints in normal reading. This methodology avoids confounds inherent in conventional measures of predictability, allowing for theoretically deeper accounts…
As is the case of many signals produced by complex systems, language presents a statistical structure that is balanced between order and disorder. Here we review and extend recent results from quantitative characterisations of the degree of…
Time evolutions of number of cities, population of cities, world population, and size distribution of present languages are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each city increases by a random rate and decreases by a random…
The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis proposes that speakers aim to distribute information evenly throughout a text, balancing production effort and listener comprehension difficulty. However, language typically does not maintain…
(shortened version) Religions and languages are social variables, like age, sex, wealth or political opinions, to be studied like any other organizational parameter. In fact, religiosity is one of the most important sociological aspects of…
The processes leading to change in languages are manifold. In order to reduce ambiguity in the transmission of information, agreement on a set of conventions for recurring problems is favored. In addition to that, speakers tend to use…
Statistical laws describe regular patterns observed in diverse scientific domains, ranging from the magnitude of earthquakes (Gutenberg-Richter law) and metabolic rates in organisms (Kleiber's law), to the frequency distribution of words in…
Spoken communication occurs in a "noisy channel" characterized by high levels of environmental noise, variability within and between speakers, and lexical and syntactic ambiguity. Given these properties of the received linguistic input,…
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…
Poetic traditions across languages evolved differently, but we find that certain semantic topics occur in several of them, albeit sometimes with temporal delay, or with diverging trajectories over time. We apply Latent Dirichlet Allocation…