Related papers: Word forms - not just their lengths- are optimized…
In natural language using short sentences is considered efficient for communication. However, a text composed exclusively of such sentences looks technical and reads boring. A text composed of long ones, on the other hand, demands…
The text-length-dependence of real word-frequency distributions can be connected to the general properties of a random book. It is pointed out that this finding has strong implications, when deciding between two conceptually different views…
Quantitative linguistics has been allowed, in the last few decades, within the admittedly blurry boundaries of the field of complex systems. A growing host of applied mathematicians and statistical physicists devote their efforts to…
Patterns of word use both reflect and influence a myriad of human activities and interactions. Like other entities that are reproduced and evolve, words rise or decline depending upon a complex interplay between {their intrinsic properties…
From a grammar point of view, the role of punctuation marks in a sentence is formally defined and well understood. In semantic analysis punctuation plays also a crucial role as a method of avoiding ambiguity of the meaning. A different…
Most natural languages have a predominant or fixed word order. For example in English the word order is usually Subject-Verb-Object. This work attempts to explain this phenomenon as well as other typological findings regarding word order…
In this paper I propose a new way of measuring linguistic productivity that objectively assesses the ability of an affix to be used to coin new complex words and, unlike other popular measures, is not directly dependent upon token…
Human language can be described as a complex network of linked words. In such a treatment, each distinct word in language is a vertex of this web, and neighboring words in sentences are connected by edges. It was recently found (Ferrer and…
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…
A longstanding debate in semiotics centers on the relationship between linguistic signs and their corresponding semantics: is there an arbitrary relationship between a word form and its meaning, or does some systematic phenomenon pervade?…
A closed word (a.k.a. periodic-like word or complete first return) is a word whose longest border does not have internal occurrences, or, equivalently, whose longest repeated prefix is not right special. We investigate the structure of…
Hilberg (1990) supposed that finite-order excess entropy of a random human text is proportional to the square root of the text length. Assuming that Hilberg's hypothesis is true, we derive Guiraud's law, which states that the number of word…
The distribution of word probabilities in the monkey model of Zipf's law is associated with two universality properties: (1) the power law exponent converges strongly to $-1$ as the alphabet size increases and the letter probabilities are…
The traditional approach to morphological inflection (the task of modifying a base word (lemma) to express grammatical categories) has been, for decades, to consider lexical entries of lemma-tag-form triples uniformly, lacking any…
Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have produced general models that can perform complex tasks such as summarizing long passages and translating across languages. Here, we introduce a method to extract adjective…
Originally introduced and studied by the third and fourth authors together with J. Justin and S. Widmer in arXiv:0801.1656, rich words constitute a new class of finite and infinite words characterized by containing the maximal number of…
Zipf's law, which states that the probability of an observation is inversely proportional to its rank, has been observed in many domains. While there are models that explain Zipf's law in each of them, those explanations are typically…
Conversation is a cornerstone of social connection and is linked to well-being outcomes. Conversations vary widely in type with some portion generating complex, dynamic stories. One approach to studying how conversations unfold in time is…
It has been argued that, when learning a first language, babies use a series of small clues to aid recognition and comprehension, and that one of these clues is word length. In this paper we present a statistical part of speech tagger which…
Which statistical features distinguish a meaningful text (possibly written in an unknown system) from a meaningless set of symbols? Here we answer this question by comparing features of the first half of a text to its second half. This…