Related papers: Polysemy and brevity versus frequency in language
This paper revisits Menzerath's Law, also known as the Menzerath-Altmann Law, which models a relationship between the length of a linguistic construct and the average length of its constituents. Recent findings indicate that simple…
The prevailing maximum likelihood estimators for inferring power law models from rank-frequency data are biased. The source of this bias is an inappropriate likelihood function. The correct likelihood function is derived and shown to be…
The sequence $(x_n)_{n\in\mathbb N} = (2,5,15,51,187,\dots)$ given by the rule $x_n=(2^n+1)(2^{n-1}+1)/3$ appears in several seemingly unrelated areas of mathematics. For example, $x_n$ is the density of a language of words of length $n$…
Recent research has shown that static word embeddings can encode word frequency information. However, little has been studied about this phenomenon and its effects on downstream tasks. In the present work, we systematically study the…
Words are sequences of letters over a finite alphabet. We study two intimately related topics for this object: quasi-randomness and limit theory. With respect to the first topic we investigate the notion of uniform distribution of letters…
A topological argument is presented concering the structure of semantic space, based on the negative correlation between polysemy and word length. The resulting graph structure is applied to the modeling of free-recall experiments,…
The analysis of thousands of time series in different languages reveals that word usage presents oscillations with a prevalence of 16-year cycles, mounted on slowly varying trends. These components carry different information: while similar…
Zipf's law establishes a scaling behavior for word-frequencies in large text corpora. The appearance of Zipfian properties in human language has been previously explained as an optimization problem for the interests of speakers and hearers.…
As is the case of many signals produced by complex systems, language presents a statistical structure that is balanced between order and disorder. Here we review and extend recent results from quantitative characterisations of the degree of…
From a grammar point of view, the role of punctuation marks in a sentence is formally defined and well understood. In semantic analysis punctuation plays also a crucial role as a method of avoiding ambiguity of the meaning. A different…
Some authors have recently argued that a finite-size scaling law for the text-length dependence of word-frequency distributions cannot be conceptually valid. Here we give solid quantitative evidence for the validity of such scaling law,…
The task of finding a criterion allowing to distinguish a text from an arbitrary set of words is rather relevant in itself, for instance, in the aspect of development of means for internet-content indexing or separating signals and noise in…
Evidence is given for a systematic text-length dependence of the power-law index gamma of a single book. The estimated gamma values are consistent with a monotonic decrease from 2 to 1 with increasing length of a text. A direct connection…
Sentence formation is a highly structured, history-dependent, and sample-space reducing (SSR) process. While the first word in a sentence can be chosen from the entire vocabulary, typically, the freedom of choosing subsequent words gets…
Here we present a new class of optimality for coding systems. Members of that class are displaced linearly from optimal coding and thus exhibit Zipf's law, namely a power-law distribution of frequency ranks. Within that class, Zipf's law,…
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…
Zipf's law is a hallmark of several complex systems with a modular structure, such as books composed by words or genomes composed by genes. In these component systems, Zipf's law describes the empirical power law distribution of component…
We study the relationship between vocabulary size and text length in a corpus of $75$ literary works in English, authored by six writers, distinguishing between the contributions of three grammatical classes (or ``tags,'' namely, {\it…
We focus on the statistics of word occurrences and of the waiting times between such occurrences in Blogs. Due to the heterogeneity of words' frequencies, the empirical analysis is performed by studying classes of "frequently-equivalent"…
We show that the frequency of word use is not only determined by the word length \cite{Zipf1935} and the average information content \cite{Piantadosi2011}, but also by its emotional content. We have analyzed three established lexica of…