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Related papers: Taylor's law for Human Linguistic Sequences

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While textual frequency has been validated as relevant to human cognition in reading speed, its relatedness to Large Language Models (LLMs) is seldom studied. We propose a novel research direction in terms of textual data frequency, which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Hongyuan Adam Lu , Z. L. , Victor Wei , Zefan Zhang , Zhao Hong , Qiqi Xiang , Bowen Cao , Wai Lam

Protein concentration in a living cell fluctuates over time due to noise in growth and division processes. From extensive single-cell experiments by using E. coli strains with different promoter strength (over two orders of magnitude) and…

Biological Physics · Physics 2021-04-19 Alberto Stefano Sassi , Mayra Garcia-Alcala , Philippe Cluzel , Yuhai Tu

Statistical methods have been widely employed in many practical natural language processing applications. More specifically, complex networks concepts and methods from dynamical systems theory have been successfully applied to recognize…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2015-03-04 Diego R. Amancio

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-01-21 Alvaro Corral , Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho , Gemma Boleda , Albert Diaz-Guilera , .

First discovered by L. R. Taylor (1961, Nature), Taylor's Power Law (TPL) correlates the mean (M) population abundances and the corresponding variances (V) across a set of insect populations using a power function (V=aM^b). TPL has…

Other Quantitative Biology · Quantitative Biology 2025-06-25 Zhanshan Sam Ma , R. A. J. Taylor

Words are fundamental linguistic units that connect thoughts and things through meaning. However, words do not appear independently in a text sequence. The existence of syntactic rules induces correlations among neighboring words. Using an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-15 David Sanchez , Luciano Zunino , Juan De Gregorio , Raul Toral , Claudio Mirasso

Statistical properties of the taxonomic classification of human languages are studied. It is shown that, at the highest levels of the taxonomic hierarchy, the frequency of taxon members as a function of the number of languages belonging to…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2007-05-23 Damian H. Zanette

Many natural patterns, such as the distributions of blood particles in a blood sample, proteins on cell surfaces, biological populations in their habitat, galaxies in the universe, the sequence of human genes, and the fitness in…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2012-05-17 Zhanshan Sam Ma

The power law is ubiquitous in natural and social phenomena, and is considered as a universal relationship between the frequency and its rank for diverse social systems. However, a general model is still lacking to interpret why these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-09-27 Shuiyuan Yu , Junying Liang , Haitao Liu

Speech is a distinctive complex feature of human capabilities. In order to understand the physics underlying speech production, in this work we empirically analyse the statistics of large human speech datasets ranging several languages. We…

Physics and Society · Physics 2014-08-06 Jordi Luque , Bartolo Luque , Lucas Lacasa

We review recent progress in understanding the meaning of mutual information in natural language. Let us define words in a text as strings that occur sufficiently often. In a few previous papers, we have shown that a power-law distribution…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-03-11 Łukasz Dębowski

In this paper we combine statistical analysis of large text databases and simple stochastic models to explain the appearance of scaling laws in the statistics of word frequencies. Besides the sublinear scaling of the vocabulary size with…

Physics and Society · Physics 2014-11-05 Martin Gerlach , Eduardo G. Altmann

Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…

Physics and Society · Physics 2010-05-17 Marcelo A. Montemurro , Damian Zanette

Zipf's law has been found in many human-related fields, including language, where the frequency of a word is persistently found as a power law function of its frequency rank, known as Zipf's law. However, there is much dispute whether it is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-07-06 Shuiyuan Yu , Chunshan Xu , Haitao Liu

One of the first steps to understand and forecast economic downturns is identifying their frequency distribution, but it remains uncertain. This problem is common in phenomena displaying power-law-like distributions. Power laws play a…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2013-10-10 Salvador Pueyo

We establish a link between the phenomenon of Taylor dispersion and the theory of empirical distributions. Using this connection, we derive, upon applying the theory of large deviations, an alternative and much more precise description of…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2017-02-01 Marcel Kahlen , Andreas Engel , Christian Van den Broeck

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-08-24 Damián H. Zanette

Background: Zipf's discovery that word frequency distributions obey a power law established parallels between biological and physical processes, and language, laying the groundwork for a complex systems perspective on human communication.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2009-11-11 Eduardo G. Altmann , Janet B. Pierrehumbert , Adilson E. Motter

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-10-11 Ivan Gonzalez Torre , Bartolo Luque , Lucas Lacasa , Jordi Luque , Antoni Hernandez-Fernandez

Language modeling, a central task in natural language processing, involves estimating a probability distribution over strings. In most cases, the estimated distribution sums to 1 over all finite strings. However, in some pathological cases,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-23 Li Du , Lucas Torroba Hennigen , Tiago Pimentel , Clara Meister , Jason Eisner , Ryan Cotterell