Related papers: Statistical Patterns in Written Language
In this article, we present a fresh perspective on language, combining ideas from various sources, but mixed in a new synthesis. As in the minimalist program, the question is whether we can formulate an elegant formalism, a universal…
In this paper, we propose the beginnings of a formal framework for modeling narrative \textit{qua} narrative. Our framework affords the ability to discuss key qualities of stories and their communication, including the flow of information…
Modern technologies are generating ever-increasing amounts of data. Making use of these data requires methods that are both statistically sound and computationally efficient. Typically, the statistical and computational aspects are treated…
We use the formulation of equilibrium statistical mechanics in order to study some important characteristics of language. Using a simple expression for the Hamiltonian of a language system, which is directly implied by the Zipf law, we are…
By virtue of linguistic compositionality, few syntactic rules and a finite lexicon can generate an unbounded number of sentences. That is, language, though seemingly high-dimensional, can be explained using relatively few degrees of…
Recent contributions address the problem of language coexistence as that of two species competing to aggregate speakers, thus focusing on the dynamics of linguistic traits across populations. They draw inspiration from physics and biology…
This paper studies the effect of linguistic constraints on the large scale organization of language. It describes the properties of linguistic networks built using texts of written language with the words randomized. These properties are…
Natural language processing (NLP) systems have become a central technology in communication, education, medicine, artificial intelligence, and many other domains of research and development. While the performance of NLP methods has grown…
From the earliest days of computing, there have been tools to help shape narrative. Spell-checking, word counts, and readability analysis, give today's novelists tools that Dickens, Austen, and Shakespeare could only have dreamt of.…
Language models (LM) are capable of remarkably complex linguistic tasks; however, numerical reasoning is an area in which they frequently struggle. An important but rarely evaluated form of reasoning is understanding probability…
Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…
Typology is a subfield of linguistics that focuses on the study and classification of languages based on their structural features. Unlike genealogical classification, which examines the historical relationships between languages, typology…
Language can be described as a network of interacting objects with different qualitative properties and complexity. These networks include semantic, syntactic, or phonological levels and have been found to provide a new picture of language…
Phonetics is the scientific field concerned with the study of how speech is produced, heard and perceived. It abounds with data, such as acoustic speech recordings, neuroimaging data, or articulatory data. In this paper, we provide an…
Across languages, numeral systems vary widely in how they construct and combine numbers. While humans consistently learn to navigate this diversity, large language models (LLMs) struggle with linguistic-mathematical puzzles involving…
Many formalisms combining ontology languages with uncertainty, usually in the form of probabilities, have been studied over the years. Most of these formalisms, however, assume that the probabilistic structure of the knowledge remains…
Language models can produce fluent, grammatical text. Nonetheless, some maintain that language models don't really learn language and also that, even if they did, that would not be informative for the study of human learning and processing.…
It is argued that the present log-normal distribution of language sizes is, to a large extent, a consequence of demographic dynamics within the population of speakers of each language. A two-parameter stochastic multiplicative process is…
Conversation is a cornerstone of social connection and is linked to well-being outcomes. Conversations vary widely in type with some portion generating complex, dynamic stories. One approach to studying how conversations unfold in time is…
Human-like personality traits have recently been discovered in large language models, raising the hypothesis that their (known and as yet undiscovered) biases conform with human latent psychological constructs. While large conversational…