Related papers: Alberti's letter counts
The use of statistical methods to analyze large databases of text has been useful to unveil patterns of human behavior and establish historical links between cultures and languages. In this study, we identify literary movements by treating…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) can now generate and recognize poetry. But what do LLMs really know about poetry? We develop a task to evaluate how well LLMs recognize one aspect of English-language poetry--poetic form--which captures many…
Bolzano and Cantor were the first mathematicians to make significant attempts to measure the size (numerosity) of different infinite collections. They differed in their methodological approaches, with Cantor's prevailing. This led to the…
Computational methods for analyzing prose and poetry utilize word embeddings and other abstract representations that sometimes obscure context-rich literary text. Inspired by the psychology of reading, we utilize story structure and…
The Parry-Lord oral-formulaic theory was a breakthrough in understanding how oral narrative poetry is learned, composed, and transmitted by illiterate bards. In this paper, we provide an annotated reading of the mechanism underlying this…
The growing interest of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in minority languages has not yet bridged the gap in the preservation of oral linguistic heritage. In particular, extemporaneous poetry - a performative genre based on real-time…
This paper describes the Quantitative Criticism Lab, a collaborative initiative between classicists, quantitative biologists, and computer scientists to apply ideas and methods drawn from the sciences to the study of literature. A core goal…
On annotating multi-dialect Arabic datasets, it is common to randomly assign the samples across a pool of native Arabic speakers. Recent analyses recommended routing dialectal samples to native speakers of their respective dialects to build…
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…
The dependence of the frequency distributions due to multiple meanings of words in a text is investigated by deleting letters. By coding the words with fewer letters the number of meanings per coded word increases. This increase is measured…
Based on data from a large-scale experiment with human subjects, we conclude that the logarithm of probability to guess a word in context (unpredictability) depends linearly on the word length. This result holds both for poetry and prose,…
John Clark was inventor of the Eureka machine to generate hexameter Latin verse. He labored for 13 years from 1832 to implement the device that could compose at random over 26 million different lines of well-formed verse. This paper…
In this work, we employ quantitative methods from the realm of statistics and machine learning to develop novel methodologies for author attribution and textual analysis. In particular, we develop techniques and software suitable for…
Linguistic laws constitute one of the quantitative cornerstones of modern cognitive sciences and have been routinely investigated in written corpora, or in the equivalent transcription of oral corpora. This means that inferences of…
Due to its semantic succinctness and novelty of expression, poetry is a great test bed for semantic change analysis. However, so far there is a scarcity of large diachronic corpora. Here, we provide a large corpus of German poetry which…
The idea of measuring distance between languages seems to have its roots in the work of the French explorer Dumont D'Urville \cite{Urv}. He collected comparative words lists of various languages during his voyages aboard the Astrolabe from…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved unprecedented performance on many complex tasks, being able, for example, to answer questions on almost any topic. However, they struggle with other simple tasks, such as counting the occurrences…
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…
Arabic Rhetoric is the field of Arabic linguistics which governs the art and science of conveying a message with greater beauty, impact and persuasiveness. The field is as ancient as the Arabic language itself and is found extensively in…