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Related papers: Quantitative Entropy Study of Language Complexity

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Classical Chinese is a language notable for its word class flexibility: the same word may often be used as a noun or a verb. Bisang (2008) claimed that Classical Chinese is a precategorical language, where the syntactic position of a word…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Bai Li

Misunderstandings in cross-cultural communication often arise from subtle differences in interpretation, but it is unclear whether these differences arise from the literal meanings assigned to words or from more general pragmatic factors…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Yuka Machino , Matthias Hofer , Max Siegel , Joshua B. Tenenbaum , Robert D. Hawkins

This paper reports on results on the entropy of the Spanish language. They are based on an analysis of natural language for n-word symbols (n = 1 to 18), trigrams, digrams, and characters. The results obtained in this work are based on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2013-01-15 Fabio G. Guerrero

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Marco Scharringhausen

This paper introduces an objective metric for evaluating a parsing scheme. It is based on Shannon's original work with letter sequences, which can be extended to part-of-speech tag sequences. It is shown that this regular language is an…

cmp-lg · Computer Science 2008-02-03 Caroline Lyon , Stephen Brown

We study the frequency distributions and correlations of the word lengths of ten European languages. Our findings indicate that a) the word-length distribution of short words quantified by the mean value and the entropy distinguishes the…

Contextual influences on language often exhibit substantial cross-lingual regularities; for example, we are more verbose in situations that require finer distinctions. However, these regularities are sometimes obscured by semantic and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-05-22 Will Monroe , Jennifer Hu , Andrew Jong , Christopher Potts

Evaluating whether large language models (LLMs) capture the structure of natural language beyond local fluency remains an open challenge. Existing evaluation methods, largely based on task performance or short-context behavior, provide…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii

This paper outlines the creation of three corpora for multilingual comparison and analysis of the Voynich manuscript: a corpus of Voynich texts partitioned by Currier language, scribal hand, and transcription system, a corpus of 294…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-05-20 Luke Lindemann , Claire Bowern

When generating natural language from neural probabilistic models, high probability does not always coincide with high quality: It has often been observed that mode-seeking decoding methods, i.e., those that produce high-probability text…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-01 Clara Meister , Gian Wiher , Tiago Pimentel , Ryan Cotterell

This paper presents the first attempt, up to our knowledge, to classify English writing styles on this scale with the challenge of classifying day to day language written by writers with different backgrounds covering various areas of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-04-26 Yanging Chen , Rami Al-Rfou' , Yejin Choi

Publishing articles in high-impact English journals is difficult for scholars around the world, especially for non-native English-speaking scholars (NNESs), most of whom struggle with proficiency in English. In order to uncover the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-09-14 Chao Lu , Yi Bu , Jie Wang , Ying Ding , Vetle Torvik , Matthew Schnaars , Chengzhi Zhang

Entropy has been a common index to quantify the complexity of time series in a variety of fields. Here, we introduce increment entropy to measure the complexity of time series in which each increment is mapped into a word of two letters,…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2016-01-20 Xiaofeng Liu , Aimin Jiang , Ning Xu , Jianru Xue

Corpus-based statistical analysis plays a significant role in linguistic research, and ample evidence has shown that different languages exhibit some common laws. Studies have found that letters in some alphabetic writing languages have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-06-03 Qinghua Chen , Yan Wang , Mengmeng Wang , Xiaomeng Li

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…

Sound · Computer Science 2022-11-24 Mathias Rose Bjare , Stefan Lattner

Language prediction is constrained by informational entropy intrinsic to language, such that there exists a limit to how accurate any language model can become and equivalently a lower bound to language compression. The most efficient…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Benjamin L. Badger , Matthew Neligeorge

This paper investigates the influence of discourse features on text complexity assessment. To do so, we created two data sets based on the Penn Discourse Treebank and the Simple English Wikipedia corpora and compared the influence of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-08-22 Elnaz Davoodi , Leila Kosseim

We use an information-theoretic measure of linguistic similarity to investigate the organization and evolution of scientific fields. An analysis of almost 20M papers from the past three decades reveals that the linguistic similarity is…

Digital Libraries · Computer Science 2018-01-30 Laercio Dias , Martin Gerlach , Joachim Scharloth , Eduardo G. Altmann

This paper describes a method for providing feedback about the degree of complexity that is present in particular texts. Both the method and the software tool called TexComp are designed for use during the assessment of student compositions…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2012-06-29 T. Kakkonen

Recent work has sought to quantify large language model uncertainty to facilitate model control and modulate user trust. Previous works focus on measures of uncertainty that are theoretically grounded or reflect the average overt behavior…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Kyle Moore , Jesse Roberts , Daryl Watson , Pamela Wisniewski