Related papers: Linguistic laws in biology
The molecular biology revolution of the last seventy five years has transformed our view of living systems. Scientific explanations of biological phenomena are now synonymous with the identification of the genes, proteins, and signaling…
At the intersection of the rapidly growing biological data landscape and advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP), protein language models (PLMs) have emerged as a transformative force in modern research. These models have achieved…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
Statistical properties of the taxonomic classification of human languages are studied. It is shown that, at the highest levels of the taxonomic hierarchy, the frequency of taxon members as a function of the number of languages belonging to…
Given the rapidly evolving landscape of linguistic prevalence, whereby a majority of the world's existing languages are dying out in favor of the adoption of a comparatively fewer set of languages, the factors behind this phenomenon has…
Language understanding is a key scientific issue in the fields of cognitive and computer science. However, the two disciplines differ substantially in the specific research questions. Cognitive science focuses on analyzing the specific…
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…
Language universals have long been attributed to an innate Universal Grammar. An alternative explanation states that linguistic universals emerged independently in every language in response to shared cognitive or perceptual biases. A…
Grammatical features across human languages show intriguing correlations often attributed to learning biases in humans. However, empirical evidence has been limited to experiments with highly simplified artificial languages, and whether…
This paper introduces how human languages can be studied in light of recent development of network theories. There are two directions of exploration. One is to study networks existing in the language system. Various lexical networks can be…
We investigate mechanisms for language change within a framework where an unconventional signal for a meaning is first innovated, and then subsequently propagated through a speech community to replace the existing convention. We appeal to…
Significant advances have been made in artificial systems by using biological systems as a guide. However, there is often little interaction between computational models for emergent communication and biological models of the emergence of…
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…
Lexical semantic typology has identified important cross-linguistic generalizations about the variation and commonalities in polysemy patterns---how languages package up meanings into words. Recent computational research has enabled…
Statistical regularities in human language have fascinated researchers for decades, suggesting deep underlying principles governing its evolution and information structuring for efficient communication. While Zipf's Law describes the…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a transformative power in enhancing natural language comprehension, representing a significant stride toward artificial general intelligence. The application of LLMs extends beyond conventional…
Language modeling studies the probability distributions over strings of texts. It is one of the most fundamental tasks in natural language processing (NLP). It has been widely used in text generation, speech recognition, machine…
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…
Existential rules are an expressive knowledge representation language mainly developed to query data. In the literature, they are often supposed to be in some normal form that simplifies technical developments. For instance, a common…
Spreading dynamics is a central topic in the physics of complex systems and network science, providing a unified framework for understanding how information, behaviors, and diseases propagate through interactions among system units. In many…