Related papers: An Observation About Passphrases: Syntax vs Entrop…
This paper analyses the security contribution of typical functional-language features by examining them in the light of accepted information security principles. Imperative and functional code are compared to illustrate various cases. In…
We enumerate all ternary length-l square-free words, which are words avoiding squares of words up to length l, for l<=24. We analyse the singular behaviour of the corresponding generating functions. This leads to new upper entropy bounds…
Compounding is a highly productive word-formation process in some languages that is often problematic for natural language processing applications. In this paper, we investigate whether distributional semantics in the form of word…
This short note discusses the role of syntax vs. semantics and the interplay between logic, philosophy, and language in computer science and game theory.
We show that the predictability of letters in written English texts depends strongly on their position in the word. The first letters are usually the least easy to predict. This agrees with the intuitive notion that words are well defined…
The syntactic structures of sentences can be readily read-out from the activations of large language models (LLMs). However, the ``structural probes'' that have been developed to reveal this phenomenon are typically evaluated on an…
In this paper, we explore the following question: Are synonym substitution attacks really synonym substitution attacks (SSAs)? We approach this question by examining how SSAs replace words in the original sentence and show that there are…
Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words which are combined to form phrases. We show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a…
The problems of conditional entropy's definition and the formula to compute conditional entropy are analyzed from various perspectives, and the corrected computing formula is presented. Examples are given to prove the conclusion that…
Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…
We introduce quantitative usability and security models to guide the design of password management schemes --- systematic strategies to help users create and remember multiple passwords. In the same way that security proofs in cryptography…
In this paper we provide a quantitative framework for the study of phonological networks (PNs) for the English language by carrying out principled comparisons to null models, either based on site percolation, randomization techniques, or…
Despite the recent popularity of word embedding methods, there is only a small body of work exploring the limitations of these representations. In this paper, we consider one aspect of embedding spaces, namely their stability. We show that…
Large-scale password data breaches are becoming increasingly commonplace, which has enabled researchers to produce a substantial body of password security research utilising real-world password datasets, which often contain numbers of…
Syntactic parsing, the process of obtaining the internal structure of sentences in natural languages, is a crucial task for artificial intelligence applications that need to extract meaning from natural language text or speech. Sentiment…
Naturally-occurring bracketings, such as answer fragments to natural language questions and hyperlinks on webpages, can reflect human syntactic intuition regarding phrasal boundaries. Their availability and approximate correspondence to…
The structure of a sentence can be represented as a network where vertices are words and edges indicate syntactic dependencies. Interestingly, crossing syntactic dependencies have been observed to be infrequent in human languages. This…
We consider questions related to the structure of infinite words (over an integer alphabet) with bounded additive complexity, i.e., words with the property that the number of distinct sums exhibited by factors of the same length is bounded…
Text password has served as the most popular method for user authentication so far, and is not likely to be totally replaced in foreseeable future. Password authentication offers several desirable properties (e.g., low-cost, highly…
The aim of this work is to study the evolution of password selection among users. We investigate whether users follow best practices when selecting passwords and identify areas in need of improvement. Four distinct publicly-available…