Related papers: Word Familiarity and Frequency
Long-range correlations are found in symbolic sequences from human language, music and DNA. Determining the span of correlations in dolphin whistle sequences is crucial for shedding light on their communicative complexity. Dolphin whistles…
The corpus, from which a predictive language model is trained, can be considered the experience of a semantic system. We recorded everyday reading of two participants for two months on a tablet, generating individual corpus samples of…
Text-based communication, such as text chat, is commonly employed in various contexts, both professional and personal. However, it lacks the rich emotional cues present in verbal and visual forms of communication, such as facial expressions…
Do speakers of different languages talk differently about what they see? Behavioural and cognitive studies report cultural effects on perception; however, these are mostly limited in scope and hard to replicate. In this work, we conduct the…
A fundamental concern in linguistics has been to understand how languages change, such as in relation to word order. Since the order of words in a sentence (i.e. the relative placement of Subject, Object, and Verb) is readily identifiable…
Word-level psycholinguistic norms lend empirical support to theories of language processing. However, obtaining such human-based measures is not always feasible or straightforward. One promising approach is to augment human norming datasets…
Color-word associations play a fundamental role in human cognition and design applications. Large Language Models (LLMs) have become widely available and have demonstrated intelligent behaviors in various benchmarks with natural…
Latent semantic similarity (LSS) is a measure of the similarity of information exchanges in a conversation. Challenging the assumption that higher LSS bears more positive psychological meaning, we propose that this association might depend…
In this paper, I introduce a simple method of computing relative word frequencies for authorship attribution and similar stylometric tasks. Rather than computing relative frequencies as the number of occurrences of a given word divided by…
This work presents an information-theoretic operationalisation of cross-linguistic non-arbitrariness. It is not a new idea that there are small, cross-linguistic associations between the forms and meanings of words. For instance, it has…
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…
This study presents a fascinating linguistic property related to the number of letters in words and their corresponding numerical values. By selecting any arbitrary word, counting its constituent letters, and subsequently spelling out the…
The inverse relationship between the length of a word and the frequency of its use, first identified by G.K. Zipf in 1935, is a classic empirical law that holds across a wide range of human languages. We demonstrate that length is one…
Bringing together considerations from three research trends (honest signals of collaboration, socio-semantic networks and homophily theory), we hypothesise that word use similarity and having similar social network positions are linked with…
Selecting an appropriate book is crucial for fostering reading habits in children. While children exhibit varying levels of complexity when generating oral narratives, the question arises: do children's books also differ in narrative…
We present a theoretical and empirical investigation of the statistical behaviour of the words in a text produced by human language. To this aim, we analyse the word distribution of various texts of Italian language selected from a specific…
Large-scale dialogue datasets have recently become available for training neural dialogue agents. However, these datasets have been reported to contain a non-negligible number of unacceptable utterance pairs. In this paper, we propose a…
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,…
Spoken language evolves constrained by the economy of speech, which depends on factors such as the structure of the human mouth. This gives rise to local phonetic correlations in spoken words. Here we demonstrate that these local…
What makes a word difficult to learn, and how does the difficulty depend on the learner's native language? We computationally model vocabulary difficulty for English learners whose first language is Spanish, German, or Chinese with…