Related papers: Rank dynamics of word usage at multiple scales
Of basic interest is the quantification of the long term growth of a language's lexicon as it develops to more completely cover both a culture's communication requirements and knowledge space. Here, we explore the usage dynamics of words in…
We estimate the $n$-gram entropies of natural language texts in word-length representation and find that these are sensitive to text language and genre. We attribute this sensitivity to changes in the probability distribution of the lengths…
In this article, we investigate the properties of phoneme N-grams across half of the world's languages. We investigate if the sizes of three different N-gram distributions of the world's language families obey a power law. Further, the…
Proverbs are an essential component of language and culture, and though much attention has been paid to their history and currency, there has been comparatively little quantitative work on changes in the frequency with which they are used…
It is tempting to treat frequency trends from the Google Books data sets as indicators of the "true" popularity of various words and phrases. Doing so allows us to draw quantitatively strong conclusions about the evolution of cultural…
Ranking systems are widely used to simplify and interpret complex data across diverse domains, from economic indicators and sports scores to online content popularity. While previous studies including the Zipf's law have focused on the…
It is generally believed that, when a linguistic item acquires a new meaning, its overall frequency of use in the language rises with time with an S-shaped growth curve. Yet, this claim has only been supported by a limited number of case…
The analysis of thousands of time series in different languages reveals that word usage presents oscillations with a prevalence of 16-year cycles, mounted on slowly varying trends. These components carry different information: while similar…
We introduce a dataset for studying the evolution of words, constructed from WordNet and the Google Books Ngram Corpus. The dataset tracks the evolution of 4,000 synonym sets (synsets), containing 9,000 English words, from 1800 AD to 2000…
Chinese input recommendation plays an important role in alleviating human cost in typing Chinese words, especially in the scenario of mobile applications. The fundamental problem is to predict the conditional probability of the next word…
Natural language exhibits statistical dependencies at a wide range of scales. For instance, the mutual information between words in natural language decays like a power law with the temporal lag between them. However, many statistical…
Many complex phenomena, from the selection of traits in biological systems to hierarchy formation in social and economic entities, show signs of competition and heterogeneous performance in the temporal evolution of their components, which…
The enormous increase of popularity and use of the WWW has led in the recent years to important changes in the ways people communicate. An interesting example of this fact is provided by the now very popular social annotation systems,…
Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and…
This paper proposes methods of predicting dynamic time series (including non-stationary ones) based on a linguistic approach, namely, the study of occurrences and repetition of so-called N-grams. This approach is used in computational…
To uncover underlying mechanism of collective human dynamics, we survey more than 1.8 billion blog entries and observe the statistical properties of word appearances. We focus on words that show dynamic growth and decay with a tendency to…
The cognitive constraints that humans exhibit in their social interactions have been extensively studied by anthropologists, who have highlighted their regularities across different types of social networks. We postulate that similar…
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…
This paper introduces how human languages can be studied in light of recent development of network theories. There are two directions of exploration. One is to study networks existing in the language system. Various lexical networks can be…
This article is devoted to the verification of the empirical Heaps law in European languages using Google Books Ngram corpus data. The connection between word distribution frequency and expected dependence of individual word number on text…