Related papers: Rank dynamics of word usage at multiple scales
The emergence and global adoption of social media has rendered possible the real-time estimation of population-scale sentiment, bearing profound implications for our understanding of human behavior. Given the growing assortment of sentiment…
Written language is complex. A written text can be considered an attempt to convey a meaningful message which ends up being constrained by language rules, context dependence and highly redundant in its use of resources. Despite all these…
The explosion in the availability of natural language data in the era of social media has given rise to a host of applications such as sentiment analysis and opinion mining. Simultaneously, the growing availability of precise geolocation…
We use large language models (LLMs) to uncover long-ranged structure in English texts from a variety of sources. The conditional entropy or code length in many cases continues to decrease with context length at least to $N\sim 10^4$…
Languages are continuously undergoing changes, and the mechanisms that underlie these changes are still a matter of debate. In this work, we approach language evolution through the lens of causality in order to model not only how various…
Given a random text over a finite alphabet, we study the frequencies at which fixed-length words occur as subsequences. As the data size grows, the joint distribution of word counts exhibits a rich asymptotic structure. We investigate all…
The evolution of vocabulary in academic publishing is characterized via keyword frequencies recorded the ISI Web of Science citations database. In four distinct case-studies, evolutionary analysis of keyword frequency change through time is…
This research aims to investigate the dynamic nature of linguistic style throughout various stages of life, from post teenage to old age. By employing linguistic analysis tools and methodologies, the study will delve into the intricacies of…
Many complex generative systems use languages to create structured objects. We consider a model of random languages, defined by weighted context-free grammars. As the distribution of grammar weights broadens, a transition is found from a…
Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across…
Quantifying the speed of linguistic change is challenging due to the fact that the historical evolution of languages is sparsely documented. Consequently, traditional methods rely on phylogenetic reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a…
The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) degrades from the temporal drift between data used for model training and newer text seen during inference. One understudied avenue of language change causing data drift is the emergence of…
In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech…
In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech…
We examine the evolution of the vocabulary of a group of individuals (linguistic agents) on a scale-free network, using Monte Carlo simulations and assumptions from evolutionary game theory. It is known that when the agents are arranged in…
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…
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…
The Chapter starts with introductory information about quantitative linguistics notions, like rank--frequency dependence, Zipf's law, frequency spectra, etc. Similarities in distributions of words in texts with level occupation in quantum…
Historically, researchers and consumers have noticed a decrease in quality when applying NLP tools to minority variants of languages (i.e. Puerto Rican Spanish or Swiss German), but studies exploring this have been limited to a select few…
Language is far more than a communication tool. A wealth of information - including but not limited to the identities, psychological states, and social contexts of its users - can be gleaned through linguistic markers, and such insights are…