Related papers: Word forms - not just their lengths- are optimized…
It is often stated that human languages, as other biological systems, are shaped by cost-cutting pressures but, to what extent? Attempts to quantify the degree of optimality of languages by means of an optimality score have been scarce and…
Understanding the complexity of human language requires an appropriate analysis of the statistical distribution of words in texts. We consider the information retrieval problem of detecting and ranking the relevant words of a text by means…
Recent theoretical advancement of information density in natural language has brought the following question on desk: To what degree does natural language exhibit periodicity pattern in its encoded information? We address this question by…
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…
A quantitative method is suggested, where meanings of words, and grammatic rules about these, of a vocabulary are represented by real numbers. People meet randomly, and average their vocabularies if they are equal; otherwise they either…
Languages employ different strategies to transmit structural and grammatical information. While, for example, grammatical dependency relationships in sentences are mainly conveyed by the ordering of the words for languages like Mandarin…
Neural language models learn, to varying degrees of accuracy, the grammatical properties of natural languages. In this work, we investigate whether there are systematic sources of variation in the language models' accuracy. Focusing on…
Linguistic laws constitute one of the quantitative cornerstones of modern cognitive sciences and have been routinely investigated in written corpora, or in the equivalent transcription of oral corpora. This means that inferences 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…
We study density of rational languages under shift invariant probability measures on spaces of two-sided infinite words, which generalizes the classical notion of density studied in formal languages and automata theory. The density for a…
Knowing which strings in a massive text are significant -- that is, which strings are common and distinct from other strings -- is valuable for several applications, including text compression and tokenization. Frequency in itself is not…
Human language defines the most complex outcomes of evolution. The emergence of such an elaborated form of communication allowed humans to create extremely structured societies and manage symbols at different levels including, among others,…
We present a model of speech perception which takes into account effects of correlations between sounds. Words in this model correspond to the attractors of a suitably chosen descent dynamics. The resulting lexicon is rich in short words,…
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…
We propose a model of the speech perception of individual words in the presence of mishearings. This phenomenological approach is based on concepts used in linguistics, and provides a formalism that is universal across languages. We put…
Recent observations in the theory of verse and empirical metrics have suggested that constructing a verse line involves a pattern-matching search through a source text, and that the number of found elements (complete words totaling a…
The problem of compression in standard information theory consists of assigning codes as short as possible to numbers. Here we consider the problem of optimal coding -- under an arbitrary coding scheme -- and show that it predicts Zipf's…
Morphologically rich languages accentuate two properties of distributional vector space models: 1) the difficulty of inducing accurate representations for low-frequency word forms; and 2) insensitivity to distinct lexical relations that…
In contrast with animal communication systems, diversity is characteristic of almost every aspect of human language. Languages variously employ tones, clicks, or manual signs to signal differences in meaning; some languages lack the…
The network characteristics based on the phonological similarities in the lexicons of several languages were examined. These languages differed widely in their history and linguistic structure, but commonalities in the network…