Related papers: Linguistic laws in biology
Linguistic laws constitute one of the quantitative cornerstones of modern cognitive sciences and have been routinely investigated in written corpora, or in the equivalent transcription of oral corpora. This means that inferences of…
Quantitative linguistics has been allowed, in the last few decades, within the admittedly blurry boundaries of the field of complex systems. A growing host of applied mathematicians and statistical physicists devote their efforts to…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
Recent contributions address the problem of language coexistence as that of two species competing to aggregate speakers, thus focusing on the dynamics of linguistic traits across populations. They draw inspiration from physics and biology…
Human language and its governing rules present a number of analogies with the organization and structure of communication and information management in living organisms. This chapter will provide a short general introduction about grammar,…
Complex systems, such as life and languages, are governed by principles of evolution. The analogy and comparison between biology and linguistics\cite{alphafold2, RoseTTAFold, lang_virus, cell language, faculty1, language of gene, Protein…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
Linguistic evaluations of how well LMs generalize to produce or understand language often implicitly take for granted that natural languages are generated by symbolic rules. According to this perspective, grammaticality is determined by…
The language commonly used in human genetics can inadvertently pose problems for multiple reasons. Terms like "ancestry", "ethnicity", and other ways of grouping people can have complex, often poorly understood, or multiple meanings within…
Statistical laws describe regular patterns observed in diverse scientific domains, ranging from the magnitude of earthquakes (Gutenberg-Richter law) and metabolic rates in organisms (Kleiber's law), to the frequency distribution of words in…
Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words which are combined to form phrases. We show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a…
Elucidating the language-brain relationship requires bridging the methodological gap between the abstract theoretical frameworks of linguistics and the empirical neural data of neuroscience. Serving as an interdisciplinary cornerstone,…
The network characteristics based on the phonological similarities in the lexicons of several languages were examined. These languages differed widely in their history and linguistic structure, but commonalities in the network…
Research in quantitative evolutionary genomics and systems biology led to the discovery of several universal regularities connecting genomic and molecular phenomic variables. These universals include the log-normal distribution of the…
Methods and insights from statistical physics are finding an increasing variety of applications where one seeks to understand the emergent properties of a complex interacting system. One such area concerns the dynamics of language at a…
Zipf's law is just one out of many universal laws proposed to describe statistical regularities in language. Here we review and critically discuss how these laws can be statistically interpreted, fitted, and tested (falsified). The modern…
The importance of statistical patterns of language has been debated over decades. Although Zipf's law is perhaps the most popular case, recently, Menzerath's law has begun to be involved. Menzerath's law manifests in language, music and…
The grammars of natural languages may be learned by using genetic algorithms that reproduce and mutate grammatical rules and part-of-speech tags, improving the quality of later generations of grammatical components. Syntactic rules are…
Language models serve as a cornerstone in natural language processing (NLP), utilizing mathematical methods to generalize language laws and knowledge for prediction and generation. Over extensive research spanning decades, language modeling…
When we speak, write or listen, we continuously make predictions based on our knowledge of a language's grammar. Remarkably, children acquire this grammatical knowledge within just a few years, enabling them to understand and generalise to…