Related papers: Word Familiarity and Frequency
Similarity is a core notion that is used in psychology and two branches of linguistics: theoretical and computational. The similarity datasets that come from the two fields differ in design: psychological datasets are focused around a…
Among the several findings deriving from the application of complex network formalism to the investigation of natural phenomena, the fact that linguistic constructions follow power laws presents special interest for its potential…
Voice search is becoming a popular mode for interacting with search engines. As a result, research has gone into building better voice transcription engines, interfaces, and search engines that better handle inherent verbosity of queries.…
Machines have achieved a broad and growing set of linguistic competencies, thanks to recent progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Psychologists have shown increasing interest in such models, comparing their output to psychological…
The frequency with which the letters of the English alphabet appear in writings has been applied to the field of cryptography, the development of keyboard mechanics, and the study of linguistics. We expanded on the statistical analysis of…
Are pairs of words that tend to occur together also likely to stand in a linguistic dependency? This empirical question is motivated by a long history of literature in cognitive science, psycholinguistics, and NLP. In this work we…
Understanding the ways in which information achieves widespread public awareness is a research question of significant interest. We consider whether, and how, the way in which the information is phrased --- the choice of words and sentence…
The explanations of large language models have recently been shown to be sensitive to the randomness used for their training, creating a need to characterize this sensitivity. In this paper, we propose a characterization that questions the…
Recent work has shown that larger language models have better predictive power for eye movement and reading time data. While even the best models under-allocate probability mass to human responses, larger models assign higher-quality…
Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…
This work develops a computational model (by Automata Networks) of phonological similarity effects involved in the formation of word-meaning associations on artificial populations of speakers. Classical studies show that in recalling…
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…
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…
Colexification refers to the phenomenon of multiple meanings sharing one word in a language. Cross-linguistic lexification patterns have been shown to be largely predictable, as similar concepts are often colexified. We test a recent claim…
Numerous works use word embedding-based metrics to quantify societal biases and stereotypes in texts. Recent studies have found that word embeddings can capture semantic similarity but may be affected by word frequency. In this work we…
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…
This paper introduces Latent Relational Analysis (LRA), a method for measuring relational similarity. LRA has potential applications in many areas, including information extraction, word sense disambiguation, machine translation, and…
Memorization in large language models poses critical risks for privacy and fairness as these systems scale to billions of parameters. While previous studies established correlations between memorization and factors like token frequency and…
Large language models must satisfy hard orthographic constraints during controlled text generation, yet systematic cross-family evaluation remains limited. We evaluate 39 configurations spanning three model families (Qwen3, Claude Haiku…
A common task in computational text analyses is to quantify how two corpora differ according to a measurement like word frequency, sentiment, or information content. However, collapsing the texts' rich stories into a single number is often…