Related papers: Word Familiarity and Frequency
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.…
In this paper we describe an approach to automatic evaluation of both the speech recognition and understanding capabilities of a spoken dialogue system for train time table information. We use word accuracy for recognition and concept…
The pioneering research of G. K. Zipf on the relationship between word frequency and other word features led to the formulation of various linguistic laws. The most popular is Zipf's law for word frequencies. Here we focus on two laws that…
In this work, we show that the difference in performance of embeddings from differently sourced data for a given language can be due to other factors besides data size. Natural language processing (NLP) tasks usually perform better with…
Compositionality is a hallmark of human language that not only enables linguistic generalization, but also potentially facilitates acquisition. When simulating language emergence with neural networks, compositionality has been shown to…
Understanding texts requires memory: the reader has to keep in mind enough words to create meaning. This calls for a relation between the memory of the reader and the structure of the text. To investigate this interaction, we first identify…
Certain concepts, words, and images are intuitively more similar than others (dog vs. cat, dog vs. spoon), though quantifying such similarity is notoriously difficult. Indeed, this kind of computation is likely a critical part of learning…
According to Zipf's meaning-frequency law, words that are more frequent tend to have more meanings. Here it is shown that a linear dependency between the frequency of a form and its number of meanings is found in a family of models of…
Factual consistency is one of important summary evaluation dimensions, especially as summary generation becomes more fluent and coherent. The ESTIME measure, recently proposed specifically for factual consistency, achieves high correlations…
Word complexity is defined in a number of different ways. Psycholinguistic, morphological and lexical proxies are often used. Human ratings are also used. The problem here is that these proxies do not measure complexity directly, and human…
Anxiety, the anticipatory unease about a potential negative outcome, is a common and beneficial human emotion. However, there is still much that is not known, such as how anxiety relates to our body and how it manifests in language. This is…
Intimacy is a fundamental aspect of how we relate to others in social settings. Language encodes the social information of intimacy through both topics and other more subtle cues (such as linguistic hedging and swearing). Here, we introduce…
Large language models (LLMs) achieve impressive results in terms of fluency in text generation, yet the nature of their linguistic knowledge - in particular the human-likeness of their internal lexicon - remains uncertain. This study…
Assessing the degree of semantic relatedness between words is an important task with a variety of semantic applications, such as ontology learning for the Semantic Web, semantic search or query expansion. To accomplish this in an automated…
Statistical analysis of corpora provides an approach to quantitatively investigate natural languages. This approach has revealed that several power laws consistently emerge across different corpora and languages, suggesting universal…
Word choice is dependent on the cultural context of writers and their subjects. Different words are used to describe similar actions, objects, and features based on factors such as class, race, gender, geography and political affinity.…
The recent dramatic increase in online data availability has allowed researchers to explore human culture with unprecedented detail, such as the growth and diversification of language. In particular, it provides statistical tools to explore…
This paper investigates contextual word representation models from the lens of similarity analysis. Given a collection of trained models, we measure the similarity of their internal representations and attention. Critically, these models…
Understanding what constitutes high-quality pre-training data remains a central question in language model training. In this work, we investigate whether benchmark performance is primarily driven by the degree of statistical pattern overlap…
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…