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Related papers: Pragmatic Constraint on Distributional Semantics

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In the present paper we show that distributional information is particularly important when considering concept availability under implicit language learning conditions. Based on results from different behavioural experiments we argue that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-06-30 Dimitrios Alikaniotis , John N. Williams

Functional Distributional Semantics provides a computationally tractable framework for learning truth-conditional semantics from a corpus. Previous work in this framework has provided a probabilistic version of first-order logic, recasting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-06-05 Guy Emerson

When following a sequence - such as reading a text or tracking a user's activity - one can measure how the "dictionary" of distinct elements (types) grows with the number of observations (tokens). When this growth follows a power law, it is…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-04-21 Célestin Zimmerlin , Thomas Louail , Manuel Moussallam , Marc Barthelemy

Zipf's law states that if words of language are ranked in the order of decreasing frequency in texts, the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. It is very robust as an experimental observation, but to date it escaped…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2009-01-22 Dmitrii Manin

In this second part of our survey on the social and natural distributions, we investigate some models, which intend to explain the statistical regularity of the natural and social distributions. There is a large variety of models and in…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-07-05 L. Benguigui , M. Marinov

In the domain of unsupervised learning most work on speech has focused on discovering low-level constructs such as phoneme inventories or word-like units. In contrast, for written language, where there is a large body of work on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-10-29 Grzegorz Chrupała , Lieke Gelderloos , Ákos Kádár , Afra Alishahi

Diffusion models offer appealing properties for language generation, such as parallel decoding and iterative refinement, but the discrete and highly structured nature of text challenges the direct application of diffusion principles. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Ziqi Jin , Bin Wang , Xiang Lin , Lidong Bing , Aixin Sun

The word-frequency distribution provides the fundamental building blocks that generate discourse in language. It is well known, from empirical evidence, that the word-frequency distribution of almost any text is described by Zipf's law, at…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-11-09 Alvaro Corral , Montserrat Garcia del Muro

Language models typically tokenize text into subwords, using a deterministic, hand-engineered heuristic of combining characters into longer surface-level strings such as 'ing' or whole words. Recent literature has repeatedly shown the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Avijit Thawani , Saurabh Ghanekar , Xiaoyuan Zhu , Jay Pujara

The Gumbel-Softmax probability distribution allows learning discrete tokens in generative learning, while the Gumbel-Argmax probability distribution is useful in learning discrete structures in discriminative learning. Despite the efforts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Hedda Cohen Indelman , Tamir Hazan

It is demonstrated that under the hypothesis of boundedness, the semantics appears as a property of spontaneous physical processes. It turns that both semantic structure and semantic meaning have their own physical agents each of which is…

General Physics · Physics 2010-09-09 Maria K. Koleva

The text-length-dependence of real word-frequency distributions can be connected to the general properties of a random book. It is pointed out that this finding has strong implications, when deciding between two conceptually different views…

Physics and Society · Physics 2017-10-03 Xiao-Yong Yan , Petter Minnhagen

Quantitative linguistics has provided us with a number of empirical laws that characterise the evolution of languages and competition amongst them. In terms of language usage, one of the most influential results is Zipf's law of word…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-01-21 Alvaro Corral , Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho , Gemma Boleda , Albert Diaz-Guilera , .

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-04-18 Martin Gerlach , Francesc Font-Clos , Eduardo G. Altmann

In this paper we combine statistical analysis of large text databases and simple stochastic models to explain the appearance of scaling laws in the statistics of word frequencies. Besides the sublinear scaling of the vocabulary size with…

Physics and Society · Physics 2014-11-05 Martin Gerlach , Eduardo G. Altmann

Here we sketch a new derivation of Zipf's law for word frequencies based on optimal coding. The structure of the derivation is reminiscent of Mandelbrot's random typing model but it has multiple advantages over random typing: (1) it starts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

Distributional semantics has had enormous empirical success in Computational Linguistics and Cognitive Science in modeling various semantic phenomena, such as semantic similarity, and distributional models are widely used in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-05-20 Matthijs Westera , Gemma Boleda

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,…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2018-04-12 Alvaro Corral , Francesc Font-Clos

Construction grammar posits that constructions, or form-meaning pairings, are acquired through experience with language (the distributional learning hypothesis). But how much information about constructions does this distribution actually…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Joshua Rozner , Leonie Weissweiler , Kyle Mahowald , Cory Shain

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Sho Yokoi , Han Bao , Hiroto Kurita , Hidetoshi Shimodaira