Related papers: Universal versus system-specific features of punct…
The order of `noun and adposition' is the important parameter of word ordering rules in the world's languages. The seven parameters, `adverb and verb' and others, have a strong dependence on the `noun and adposition'. Japanese as well as…
Patterns are words with terminals and variables. The language of a pattern is the set of words obtained by uniformly substituting all variables with words that contain only terminals. In their original definition, patterns only allow for…
Some statements have one well-defined continuation (e.g., "the Eiffel Tower is in [Paris]"), whereas others have a natural distribution over multiple options (e.g., "the weighted coin flip was [Heads/Tails].") We argue that language model…
We investigate the response function of human agents as demonstrated by written correspondence, uncovering a new universal pattern for how the reactive dynamics of individuals is distributed across the set of each agent's contacts. In…
Identifying and modeling patterns of human activity has important ramifications in applications ranging from predicting disease spread to optimizing resource allocation. Because of its relevance and availability, written correspondence…
We present a model of speech perception which takes into account effects of correlations between sounds. Words in this model correspond to the attractors of a suitably chosen descent dynamics. The resulting lexicon is rich in short words,…
Punctuation plays a vital role in structuring meaning, yet current models often struggle to restore it accurately in transcripts of spontaneous speech, especially in the presence of disfluencies such as false starts and backtracking. These…
Exploiting the fact that natural languages are complex systems, the present exploratory article proposes a direct method based on frequency distributions that may be useful when making a decision on the status of problematic phonemes, an…
Hidden structural patterns in written texts have been subject of considerable research in the last decades. In particular, mapping a text into a time series of sentence lengths is a natural way to investigate text structure. Typically,…
Correlations between high life expectancy and low lifespan inequality are frequently observed. A recent article seeks to explain this phenomenon by proposing that a mortality improvement maps to life expectancy and relative lifespan…
In a language corpus, the probability that a word occurs $n$ times is often proportional to $1/n^2$. Assigning rank, $s$, to words according to their abundance, $\log s$ vs $\log n$ typically has a slope of minus one. That simple Zipf's law…
The average predictability (aka informativity) of a word in context has been shown to condition word duration (Seyfarth, 2014). All else being equal, words that tend to occur in more predictable environments are shorter than words that tend…
Parallel texts (bitexts) have properties that distinguish them from other kinds of parallel data. First, most words translate to only one other word. Second, bitext correspondence is noisy. This article presents methods for biasing…
Causal processes can give rise to distinctive distributions in the linguistic variables that they affect. Consequently, a secure understanding of a variable's distribution can hold a key to understanding the forces that have causally shaped…
Statistical studies of languages have focused on the rank-frequency distribution of words. Instead, we introduce here a measure of how word ranks change in time and call this distribution \emph{rank diversity}. We calculate this diversity…
Recent theoretical advancement of information density in natural language has brought the following question on desk: To what degree does natural language exhibit periodicity pattern in its encoded information? We address this question by…
Benford's law states that many data sets have a bias towards lower leading digits (about $30\%$ are 1s). There are numerous applications, from designing efficient computers to detecting tax, voter and image fraud. It's important to know…
Simple methods permit to generalize the concepts of iteration and of recursive processes. We shall see briefly on several examples what these methods generate. In additive sequences, we shall encounter not only the golden or the silver…
This paper describes a universal model for paraphrasing that transforms according to defined criteria. We showed that by using different criteria we could construct different kinds of paraphrasing systems including one for answering…
The structure of all the permutations of a sequence can be represented as a permutohedron, a graph where vertices are permutations and two vertices are linked if a swap of adjacent elements in the permutation of one of the vertices produces…