Related papers: Universal versus system-specific features of punct…
Recent research shows that punctuation patterns in texts exhibit universal features across languages. Analysis of Western classical literature reveals that the distribution of spaces between punctuation marks aligns with a discrete Weibull…
As the recent studies indicate, the structure imposed onto written texts by the presence of punctuation develops patterns which reveal certain characteristics of universality. In particular, based on a large collection of classic literary…
The complexity characteristics of texts written in natural languages are significantly related to the rules of punctuation. In particular, the distances between punctuation marks measured by the number of words quite universally follow the…
A statistical physics study of punctuation effects on sentence lengths is presented for written texts: {\it Alice in wonderland} and {\it Through a looking glass}. The translation of the first text into esperanto is also considered as a…
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…
Grammatical features such as number and gender serve two central functions in human languages. While they encode salient semantic attributes like numerosity and animacy, they also offload sentence processing cost by predictably linking…
What statistical properties might support learning abstract grammatical knowledge from linear input? We address this question by examining the statistical distribution of function words. Function words have been argued to aid acquisition…
Whether enjoying the lucid prose of a favorite author or slogging through some other writer's cumbersome, heavy-set prattle (full of parentheses, em dashes, compound adjectives, and Oxford commas), readers will notice stylistic signatures…
Language, which allows complex ideas to be communicated through symbolic sequences, is a characteristic feature of our species and manifested in a multitude of forms. Using large written corpora for many different languages and scripts, we…
The review summarizes the main methodological concepts used in studying natural language from the perspective of complexity science and documents their applicability in identifying both universal and system-specific features of language in…
Punctuation is a strong indicator of syntactic structure, and parsers trained on text with punctuation often rely heavily on this signal. Punctuation is a diversion, however, since human language processing does not rely on punctuation to…
Zipf's law has been found in many human-related fields, including language, where the frequency of a word is persistently found as a power law function of its frequency rank, known as Zipf's law. However, there is much dispute whether it is…
While there exist scores of natural languages, each with its unique features and idiosyncrasies, they all share a unifying theme: enabling human communication. We may thus reasonably predict that human cognition shapes how these languages…
Few, if any, current NLP systems make any significant use of punctuation. Intuitively, a treatment of punctuation seems necessary to the analysis and production of text. Whilst this has been suggested in the fields of discourse structure,…
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…
Zipf's law of abbreviation, namely the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter, has been viewed as a manifestation of compression, i.e. the minimization of the length of forms -- a universal principle of natural communication.…
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.…
The syntactic structure of a sentence can be represented as a graph, where vertices are words and edges indicate syntactic dependencies between them. In this setting, the distance between two linked words is defined as the difference…
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…
Labeling of sentence boundaries is a necessary prerequisite for many natural language processing tasks, including part-of-speech tagging and sentence alignment. End-of-sentence punctuation marks are ambiguous; to disambiguate them most…