Related papers: The Role of Word Length in Semantic Topology
A theoretical framework is proposed for the understanding of verbal perception -- the conversion of words into meaning, modeled as a compromise between lexical demands and contextual constraints -- and the theory is tested against…
A stochastic model of short-term verbal memory is proposed, in which the psychological state of the subject is encoded as the instantaneous position of a particle diffusing over a semantic graph with a probabilistic structure. The model is…
Emphasis Selection is a newly proposed task which focuses on choosing words for emphasis in short sentences. Traditional methods only consider the sequence information of a sentence while ignoring the rich sentence structure and word…
Traditional studies of memory for meaningful narratives focus on specific stories and their semantic structures but do not address common quantitative features of recall across different narratives. We introduce a statistical ensemble of…
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…
Recently, it has been claimed that a linear relationship between a measure of information content and word length is expected from word length optimization and it has been shown that this linearity is supported by a strong correlation…
Persistent homology is a technique recently developed in algebraic and computational topology well-suited to analysing structure in complex, high-dimensional data. In this paper, we exposit the theory of persistent homology from first…
Compositionality in language refers to how much the meaning of some phrase can be decomposed into the meaning of its constituents and the way these constituents are combined. Based on the premise that substitution by synonyms is…
The paper presents a language model that develops syntactic structure and uses it to extract meaningful information from the word history, thus enabling the use of long distance dependencies. The model assigns probability to every joint…
Based on data from a large-scale experiment with human subjects, we conclude that the logarithm of probability to guess a word in context (unpredictability) depends linearly on the word length. This result holds both for poetry and prose,…
We derive an exact representation of the topological effect on the dynamics of sequence processing neural networks within signal-to-noise analysis. A new network structure parameter, loopiness coefficient, is introduced to quantitatively…
We present statistical analyses of the large-scale structure of three types of semantic networks: word associations, WordNet, and Roget's thesaurus. We show that they have a small-world structure, characterized by sparse connectivity, short…
Spoken language evolves constrained by the economy of speech, which depends on factors such as the structure of the human mouth. This gives rise to local phonetic correlations in spoken words. Here we demonstrate that these local…
A computational model of the construction of word meaning through exposure to texts is built in order to simulate the effects of co-occurrence values on word semantic similarities, paragraph by paragraph. Semantic similarity is here viewed…
Human languages expand vocabularies by combining existing morphemes rather than inventing arbitrary forms. Communicative efficiency shapes lexical systems at multiple levels (Gibson et al., 2019), yet morphological composition -- combining…
This study examines whether sentence-level memory load in comprehension is better explained by linear proximity between syntactically related words or by the structural density of the intervening material. Building on locality-based…
How universal is human conceptual structure? The way concepts are organized in the human brain may reflect distinct features of cultural, historical, and environmental background in addition to properties universal to human cognition.…
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…
Syntax connects words to each other in very specific ways. Two words are syntactically connected if they depend directly on each other. Syntactic connections usually happen within a sentence. Gathering all those connection across several…
Though there is a strong consensus that word length and frequency are the most important single-word features determining visual-orthographic access to the mental lexicon, there is less agreement as how to best capture syntactic and…