Related papers: An Observation About Passphrases: Syntax vs Entrop…
We study the entropy of Chinese and English texts, based on characters in case of Chinese texts and based on words for both languages. Significant differences are found between the languages and between different personal styles of debating…
As ontologies proliferate and automatic reasoners become more powerful, the problem of protecting sensitive information becomes more serious. In particular, as facts can be inferred from other facts, it becomes increasingly likely that…
Many computer-based authentication schemata are based on pass- words. Logging on a computer, reading email, accessing content on a web server are all examples of applications where the identification of the user is usually accomplished…
Maintaining information in context is essential in successful real-time language comprehension, but maintenance is cognitively costly and can slow processing. We hypothesize that rational language users selectively maintain information that…
The average uncertainty associated with words is an information-theoretic concept at the heart of quantitative and computational linguistics. The entropy has been established as a measure of this average uncertainty - also called average…
Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) are commonly used as an authentication mechanism. An important security requirement is that PINs should be hard to guess for an attacker. On the other hand, remembering several random PINs can be…
English allows for both compounds (e.g., London-made) and phrasal paraphrases (e.g., made in London). While these constructions have roughly the same truth-conditional meaning, we hypothesize that the compound allows less freedom to express…
Text-based secrets are still the most commonly used authentication mechanism in information systems. IT managers must strike a balance between security and memorability while developing password policies. Initially introduced as more secure…
Security questions are one of the mechanisms used to recover passwords. Strong answers to security questions (i.e. high entropy) are hard for attackers to guess or obtain using social engineering techniques (e.g. monitoring of social…
Text-based passwords continue to be the prime form of authentication to computer systems. Today, they are increasingly created and used with mobile text entry methods, such as touchscreens and mobile keyboards, in addition to traditional…
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…
Word embeddings have become a staple of several natural language processing tasks, yet much remains to be understood about their properties. In this work, we analyze word embeddings in terms of their principal components and arrive at a…
In this study, the output of large language models (LLM) is considered an information source generating an unlimited sequence of symbols drawn from a finite alphabet. Given the probabilistic nature of modern LLMs, we assume a probabilistic…
The syntactic structure of sentences exhibits a striking regularity: dependencies tend to not cross when drawn above the sentence. We investigate two competing explanations. The traditional hypothesis is that this trend arises from an…
It has been shown in a recent publication that words in human-produced English language tend to have an information content close to the conditional entropy. In this paper, we show that the same is true for events in human-produced…
The ability to produce and understand an unlimited number of different sentences is a hallmark of human language. Linguists have sought to define the essence of this generative capacity using formal grammars that describe the syntactic…
Propositional Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) is a popular formalism for specifying desirable requirements and security and privacy policies for software, networks, and systems. Yet expressing such requirements and policies in LTL remains…
Language sciences rely less and less on formal syntax as their base. The reason is probably its lack of psychological reality, knowingly avoided. Philosophers of science call for a paradigm shift in which explanations are by mechanisms, as…
Although it is common for users to select bad passwords that can be easily cracked by attackers, password-based authentication remains the most widely-used method. To encourage users to select good passwords, enterprises often enforce…
In this paper we will look at the distribution with which passwords are chosen. Zipf's Law is commonly observed in lists of chosen words. Using password lists from four different on-line sources, we will investigate if Zipf's law is a good…