Related papers: Polysemy and brevity versus frequency in language
Quantifying the similarity between symbolic sequences is a traditional problem in Information Theory which requires comparing the frequencies of symbols in different sequences. In numerous modern applications, ranging from DNA over music to…
One of the ultimate goals for linguists is to find universal properties in human languages. Although words are generally considered as representing arbitrary mapping between linguistic forms and meanings, we propose a new universal law that…
Many features from texts and languages can now be inferred from statistical analyses using concepts from complex networks and dynamical systems. In this paper we quantify how topological properties of word co-occurrence networks and…
The distribution of word probabilities in the monkey model of Zipf's law is associated with two universality properties: (1) the power law exponent converges strongly to $-1$ as the alphabet size increases and the letter probabilities are…
Language modelling is regularly analysed at word, subword or character units, but syllables are seldom used. Syllables provide shorter sequences than characters, they can be extracted with rules, and their segmentation typically requires…
In this work we analyze statistical properties of 91 relatively small texts in 7 different languages (Spanish, English, French, German, Turkish, Russian, Icelandic) as well as texts with randomly inserted spaces. Despite the size (around…
Recent observations in the theory of verse and empirical metrics have suggested that constructing a verse line involves a pattern-matching search through a source text, and that the number of found elements (complete words totaling a…
Conversation is a cornerstone of social connection and is linked to well-being outcomes. Conversations vary widely in type with some portion generating complex, dynamic stories. One approach to studying how conversations unfold in time is…
Zipf's law describes the empirical size distribution of the components of many systems in natural and social sciences and humanities. We show, by solving a statistical model, that Zipf's law co-occurs with the maximization of the diversity…
Zipf's law states that sequential frequencies of words in a text correspond to a power function. Its probabilistic model is an infinite urn scheme with asymptotically power distribution. The exponent of this distribution must be estimated.…
The word embedding space in neural models is skewed, and correcting this can improve task performance. We point out that most approaches for modeling, correcting, and measuring the symmetry of an embedding space implicitly assume that the…
Zipf's law states that the frequency of an observation with a given value is inversely proportional to the square of that value; Taylor's law, instead, describes the scaling between fluctuations in the size of a population and its mean.…
A theoretical framework is proposed for the understanding of verbal perception -- the conversion of words into meaning, modeled as a compromise between lexical demands and contextual constraints -- and the theory is tested against…
Time evolution of the cities and of the languages is considered in terms of multiplicative noise and fragmentation processes; where power law (Pareto-Zipf law) and slightly asymmetric log-normal (Gauss) distribution result for the size…
Tokenization is a fundamental step in natural language processing (NLP) and other sequence modeling domains, where the choice of vocabulary size significantly impacts model performance. Despite its importance, selecting an optimal…
This paper introduces a statistical and other analysis of peer reviewers in order to approach their "quality" through some quantification measure, thereby leading to some quality metrics. Peer reviewer reports for the Journal of the Serbian…
It has been claimed that within a language, morphologically irregular words are more likely to be phonotactically simple and morphologically regular words are more likely to be phonotactically complex. This inverse correlation has been…
In this paper we quantify the consistency of word usage in written texts represented by complex networks, where words were taken as nodes, by measuring the degree of preservation of the node neighborhood.} Words were considered highly…
The time variation of the rank $k$ of words for six Indo-European languages is obtained using data from Google Books. For low ranks the distinct languages behave differently, maybe due to syntaxis rules, whereas for $k>50$ the law of large…
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…