Related papers: In narrative texts punctuation marks obey the same…
A curious observation was made that the rank statistics of scientific citation numbers follows Zipf-Mandelbrot's law. The same pow-like behavior is exhibited by some simple random citation models. The observed regularity indicates not so…
The analysis of thousands of time series in different languages reveals that word usage presents oscillations with a prevalence of 16-year cycles, mounted on slowly varying trends. These components carry different information: while similar…
The formation of sentences is a highly structured and history-dependent process. The probability of using a specific word in a sentence strongly depends on the 'history' of word-usage earlier in that sentence. We study a simple…
As is the case of many signals produced by complex systems, language presents a statistical structure that is balanced between order and disorder. Here we review and extend recent results from quantitative characterisations of the degree of…
Sentences are important semantic units of natural language. A generic, distributional representation of sentences that can capture the latent semantics is beneficial to multiple downstream applications. We observe a simple geometry of…
The inverse relationship between the length of a word and the frequency of its use, first identified by G.K. Zipf in 1935, is a classic empirical law that holds across a wide range of human languages. We demonstrate that length is one…
The task of finding a criterion allowing to distinguish a text from an arbitrary set of words is rather relevant in itself, for instance, in the aspect of development of means for internet-content indexing or separating signals and noise in…
Zipf's law states that sequential frequencies of words in a text correspond to a power function. Its probabilistic model is an infinite urn scheme with asymptotically power distribution. The exponent of this distribution must be estimated.…
Zipf's law is found when the vocabulary of long written texts is ranked according to the frequency of word occurrences, establishing a power-law decay for the frequency vs rank relation. This law is a robust statistical property observed…
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…
With Zipf's law being originally and most famously observed for word frequency, it is surprisingly limited in its applicability to human language, holding over no more than three to four orders of magnitude before hitting a clear break in…
Hidden structural patterns in written texts have been subject of considerable research in the last decades. In particular, mapping a text into a time series of sentence lengths is a natural way to investigate text structure. Typically,…
In this study, we investigate whether speech symbols, learned through deep learning, follow Zipf's law, akin to natural language symbols. Zipf's law is an empirical law that delineates the frequency distribution of words, forming…
Beyond the local constraints imposed by grammar, words concatenated in long sequences carrying a complex message show statistical regularities that may reflect their linguistic role in the message. In this paper, we perform a systematic…
Zipf's law is just one out of many universal laws proposed to describe statistical regularities in language. Here we review and critically discuss how these laws can be statistically interpreted, fitted, and tested (falsified). The modern…
One of the ultimate goals for linguists is to find universal properties in human languages. Although words are generally considered as representing arbitrary mapping between linguistic forms and meanings, we propose a new universal law that…
What statistical properties might support learning abstract grammatical knowledge from linear input? We address this question by examining the statistical distribution of function words. Function words have been argued to aid acquisition…
We focus on the statistics of word occurrences and of the waiting times between such occurrences in Blogs. Due to the heterogeneity of words' frequencies, the empirical analysis is performed by studying classes of "frequently-equivalent"…
The complexity characteristics of texts written in natural languages are significantly related to the rules of punctuation. In particular, the distances between punctuation marks measured by the number of words quite universally follow the…
Understanding texts requires memory: the reader has to keep in mind enough words to create meaning. This calls for a relation between the memory of the reader and the structure of the text. To investigate this interaction, we first identify…