Related papers: Linguistic laws in biology
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
Legislation can be viewed as a body of prescriptive rules expressed in natural language. The application of legislation to facts of a case we refer to as statutory reasoning, where those facts are also expressed in natural language.…
It is argued that the present log-normal distribution of language sizes is, to a large extent, a consequence of demographic dynamics within the population of speakers of each language. A two-parameter stochastic multiplicative process is…
The use of causal language in observational studies has raised concerns about overstatement in scientific communication. While some argue that such language should be reserved for randomized controlled trials, others contend that rigorous…
We provide an overview of the emergence of large language models for scientific computing applications. We highlight use cases that involve natural language processing of scientific documents and specialized languages designed to describe…
Biology is data-rich, and it is equally rich in concepts and hypotheses. Part of trying to understand biological processes and systems is therefore to confront our ideas and hypotheses with data using statistical methods to determine the…
All living organisms use the same genetic languages in their molecular biology machinery. They can be understood as the optimal solutions to the replication tasks involving DNA and proteins. These solutions perfectly fit the pattern…
Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLM) have stirred up global attention, and the research has been accelerating non-stop since then. Philosophers and psychologists have also been researching the structure of language for…
Over the last million years, human language has emerged and evolved as a fundamental instrument of social communication and semiotic representation. People use language in part to convey emotional information, leading to the central and…
Although information theoretic characterizations of human communication have become increasingly popular in linguistics, to date they have largely involved grafting probabilistic constructs onto older ideas about grammar. Similarities…
We adopt an evolutionary view on language change in which cognitive factors (in addition to social ones) affect the fitness of words and their success in the linguistic ecosystem. Specifically, we propose a variety of psycholinguistic…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as agents that interact with users and with the world. To do so successfully, LLMs must construct representations of the world and form probabilistic beliefs about them. To provide…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming language sciences. However, their widespread deployment currently suffers from methodological fragmentation and a lack of systematic soundness. This study proposes two comprehensive…
Classes of linguistic paradoxes and linguistic tautologies are introduced with examples and explanations. They are part of the author's work on the Paradoxist Philosophy based on mathematical logic. The general cases exposed below are…
The recent interest in human dynamics has led researchers to investigate the stochastic processes that explain human behaviour in different contexts. Here we propose a generative model to capture the essential dynamics of survival analysis,…
The sequential structure of language, and the order of words in a sentence specifically, plays a central role in human language processing. Consequently, in designing computational models of language, the de facto approach is to present…
Distributional semantics is the linguistic theory that a word's meaning can be derived from its distribution in natural language (i.e., its use). Language models are commonly viewed as an implementation of distributional semantics, as they…
In this paper the Zipf-Mandelbrot law is revisited in the context of linguistics. Despite its widespread popularity the Zipf--Mandelbrot law can only describe the statistical behaviour of a rather restricted fraction of the total number of…
We aim to provide an explanation for how the human brain might connect words for sentence formation. A novel approach to modeling syntactic representation is introduced, potentially showing the existence of universal syntactic structures…
Linguistic typology studies the range of structures present in human language. The main goal of the field is to discover which sets of possible phenomena are universal, and which are merely frequent. For example, all languages have vowels,…