Related papers: Verifying Heaps' law using Google Books Ngram data
The impact of text length on the estimation of lexical diversity has captured the attention of the scientific community for more than a century. Numerous indices have been proposed, and many studies have been conducted to evaluate them, but…
In multimedia, text or bioinformatics databases, applications query sequences of n consecutive symbols called n-grams. Estimating the number of distinct n-grams is a view-size estimation problem. While view sizes can be estimated by…
Many words have evolved in meaning as a result of cultural and social change. Understanding such changes is crucial for modelling language and cultural evolution. Low-dimensional embedding methods have shown promise in detecting words'…
Vocabularies are used for modeling data in Knowledge Graphs (KG) like the Linked Open Data Cloud and Wikidata. During their lifetime, the vocabularies of the KGs are subject to changes. New terms are coined, while existing terms are…
This paper uses computational experiments to explore the role of exposure in the emergence of construction grammars. While usage-based grammars are hypothesized to depend on a learner's exposure to actual language use, the mechanisms of…
Present human languages display slightly asymmetric log-normal (Gauss) distribution for size [1-3], whereas present cities follow power law (Pareto-Zipf law)[4]. Our model considers the competition between languages and that between cities…
Heap's Law states that in a large enough text corpus, the number of types as a function of tokens grows as $N=KM^\beta$ for some free parameters $K,\beta$. Much has been written about how this result and various generalizations can be…
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…
The word-frequency distribution provides the fundamental building blocks that generate discourse in language. It is well known, from empirical evidence, that the word-frequency distribution of almost any text is described by Zipf's law, at…
This paper introduces new methods based on exponential families for modeling the correlations between words in text and speech. While previous work assumed the effects of word co-occurrence statistics to be constant over a window of several…
We introduce a model for the retrieval of information hidden in legal texts. These are typically organised in a hierarchical (tree) structure, which a reader interested in a given provision needs to explore down to the "deepest" level…
Despite being a paradigm of quantitative linguistics, Zipf's law for words suffers from three main problems: its formulation is ambiguous, its validity has not been tested rigorously from a statistical point of view, and it has not been…
The word-stock of a language is a complex dynamical system in which words can be created, evolve, and become extinct. Even more dynamic are the short-term fluctuations in word usage by individuals in a population. Building on the recent…
We present work in progress on the temporal progression of compositionality in noun-noun compounds. Previous work has proposed computational methods for determining the compositionality of compounds. These methods try to automatically…
Scientific cooperation on an international level has been well studied in the literature. However, much less is known about this cooperation on the intercontinental level. In this paper, we address this issue by creating a collection of…
Surprisal theory has provided a unifying framework for understanding many phenomena in sentence processing (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008a), positing that a word's conditional probability given all prior context fully determines processing…
We prime-encode the natural numbers via recursive factorisation, iterated to the exponents, generating a corpus of planar rooted trees equivalently represented as Dyck words. This forms a deterministic text endowed with internal rules.…
Words of estimative probability (WEP) are expressions of a statement's plausibility (probably, maybe, likely, doubt, likely, unlikely, impossible...). Multiple surveys demonstrate the agreement of human evaluators when assigning numerical…
Based on the Aristotelian concept of potentiality vs. actuality allowing for the study of energy and dynamics in language, we propose a field approach to lexical analysis. Falling back on the distributional hypothesis to statistically model…
Quantitative linguistics has provided us with a number of empirical laws that characterise the evolution of languages and competition amongst them. In terms of language usage, one of the most influential results is Zipf's law of word…