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Related papers: Exact Probability Distribution versus Entropy

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How hard is it guess a password? Massey showed that that the Shannon entropy of the distribution from which the password is selected is a lower bound on the expected number of guesses, but one which is not tight in general. In a series of…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2013-02-12 Mark M. Christiansen , Ken R. Duffy

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Christian Clark , Byung-Doh Oh , William Schuler

We consider the number of occurrences of subwords (non-consecutive sub-sequences) in a given word. We first define the notion of subword entropy of a given word that measures the maximal number of occurrences among all possible subwords. We…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-10-06 Wenjie Fang

In a language corpus, the probability that a word occurs $n$ times is often proportional to $1/n^2$. Assigning rank, $s$, to words according to their abundance, $\log s$ vs $\log n$ typically has a slope of minus one. That simple Zipf's law…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2019-03-27 Steven A. Frank

There are two methods for counting the number of occurrences of a string in another large string. One is to count the number of places where the string is found. The other is to determine how many pieces of string can be extracted without…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-11-09 Ayaka Takamoto , Mitsuo Yoshida , Kyoji Umemura

In this work we consider the problem of searches that utilises past information gathered during searching, to evaluate the probability distribution of finding the source at each step. We start with a sample strategy where the movement at…

Other Condensed Matter · Physics 2021-02-17 Vaibhav Wasnik

We study the relative entropy between the empirical estimate of a discrete distribution and the true underlying distribution. If the minimum value of the probability mass function exceeds an $\alpha > 0$ (i.e. when the true underlying…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-09-21 Alankrita Bhatt , Ankit Pensia

Word complexity is defined in a number of different ways. Psycholinguistic, morphological and lexical proxies are often used. Human ratings are also used. The problem here is that these proxies do not measure complexity directly, and human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Michael Dalvean

Autoregressive neural language models (LMs) generate a probability distribution over tokens at each time step given a prompt. In this work, we attempt to systematically understand the probability distributions that LMs can produce, showing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Haojin Wang , Zining Zhu , Freda Shi

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,…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2007-07-16 Dmitrii Manin

Consider the situation where a word is chosen probabilistically from a finite list. If an attacker knows the list and can inquire about each word in turn, then selecting the word via the uniform distribution maximizes the attacker's…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2013-05-14 Mark M. Christiansen , Ken R. Duffy , Flavio du Pin Calmon , Muriel Medard

Entropy is a measure of heterogeneity widely used in applied sciences, often when data are collected over space. Recently, a number of approaches has been proposed to include spatial information in entropy. The aim of entropy is to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-11-12 Linda Altieri , Daniela Cocchi , Giulia Roli

The classical combinatorics-based password strength formula provides a result in tens of bits, whereas the NIST Entropy Estimation Suite give a result between 0 and 1 for Min-entropy. In this work, we present a newly developed metric --…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-29 Khan Reaz , Gerhard Wunder

This paper focuses on the problem of finding a distribution for an associated entropic vector in the entropy space nearest to a given, possibly non-entropic, target vector for random variables with a constraint on alphabet size. We show the…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-07-24 Sultan Alam , Satyajit Thakor , Syed Abbas

This paper shows how to evolve numerically the maximum entropy probability distributions for a given set of constraints, which is a variational calculus problem. An evolutionary algorithm can obtain approximations to some well-known…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-02-07 Raul Rojas

We analyse correspondence of a text to a simple probabilistic model. The model assumes that the words are selected independently from an infinite dictionary. The probability distribution correspond to the Zipf---Mandelbrot law. We count…

We prove existence of asymptotic entropy of random walks on regular languages over a finite alphabet and we give formulas for it. Furthermore, we show that the entropy varies real-analytically in terms of probability measures of constant…

Probability · Mathematics 2015-03-11 Lorenz A. Gilch

We consider the problem of estimating the probability of an observed string drawn i.i.d. from an unknown distribution. The key feature of our study is that the length of the observed string is assumed to be of the same order as the size of…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2007-07-13 Aaron B. Wagner , Pramod Viswanath , Sanjeev R. Kulkarni

Entropy rate of sequential data-streams naturally quantifies the complexity of the generative process. Thus entropy rate fluctuations could be used as a tool to recognize dynamical perturbations in signal sources, and could potentially be…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2014-03-24 Ishanu Chattopadhyay , Hod Lipson

Variable-length compression without prefix-free constraints and with side-information available at both encoder and decoder is considered. Instead of requiring the code to be error-free, we allow for it to have a non-vanishing error…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-08-24 Yuta Sakai , Vincent Y. F. Tan