Related papers: Positive words carry less information than negativ…

Over the last million years, human language has emerged and evolved as a fundamental instrument of social communication and semiotic representation. People use language in part to convey emotional information, leading to the central and…

Prior work has revealed that positive words occur more frequently than negative words in human expressions, which is typically attributed to positivity bias, a tendency for people to report positive views of reality. But what about the…

Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora in 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence of a deep imprint of human sociality in language, observing that (1) the words of natural human language…

Social media have become the main vehicle of information production and consumption online. Millions of users every day log on their Facebook or Twitter accounts to get updates and news, read about their topics of interest, and become…

Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…

The inverse relationship between the length of a word and the frequency of its use, first identified by G.K. Zipf in 1935, is a classic empirical law that holds across a wide range of human languages. We demonstrate that length is one…

Psycholinguistic studies of human word processing and lexical access provide ample evidence of the preferred nature of word-initial versus word-final segments, e.g., in terms of attention paid by listeners (greater) or the likelihood of…

Social media are used as main discussion channels by millions of individuals every day. The content individuals produce in daily social-media-based micro-communications, and the emotions therein expressed, may impact the emotional states of…

According to Zipf's meaning-frequency law, words that are more frequent tend to have more meanings. Here it is shown that a linear dependency between the frequency of a form and its number of meanings is found in a family of models of…

The analysis of thousands of time series in different languages reveals that word usage presents oscillations with a prevalence of 16-year cycles, mounted on slowly varying trends. These components carry different information: while similar…

Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (e.g., time, space, color, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing…

We demonstrate that the concerns expressed by Garcia et al. are misplaced, due to (1) a misreading of our findings in [1]; (2) a widespread failure to examine and present words in support of asserted summary quantities based on word usage…

Studies of affect labeling, i.e. putting your feelings into words, indicate that it can attenuate positive and negative emotions. Here we track the evolution of individual emotions for tens of thousands of Twitter users by analyzing the…

Word frequency is assumed to correlate with word familiarity, but the strength of this correlation has not been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we report on our analysis of the correlation between a word familiarity rating list…

Words play a central role in how we express ourselves. Lexicons of word-emotion associations are widely used in research and real-world applications for sentiment analysis, tracking emotions associated with products and policies, studying…

Fake news on social media has large, negative implications for society. However, little is known about what linguistic cues make people fall for fake news and, hence, how to design effective countermeasures for social media. In this study,…

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…

The extent to which men and women use language differently has been questioned previously. Finding clear and consistent gender differences in language is not conclusive in general, and the research is heavily influenced by the context and…

Given the growing ubiquity of emojis in language, there is a need for methods and resources that shed light on their meaning and communicative role. One conspicuous aspect of emojis is their use to convey affect in ways that may otherwise…

There is a new generation of emoticons, called emojis, that is increasingly being used in mobile communications and social media. In the past two years, over ten billion emojis were used on Twitter. Emojis are Unicode graphic symbols, used…