Related papers: Swap distance minimization beyond entropy minimiza…
We study the space requirements of a sorting algorithm where only items that at the end will be adjacent are kept together. This is equivalent to the following combinatorial problem: Consider a string of fixed length n that starts as a…
Despite renewed interest in emergent language simulations with neural networks, little is known about the basic properties of the induced code, and how they compare to human language. One fundamental characteristic of the latter, known as…
We investigate the longest common substring problem for encoded sequences and its asymptotic behaviour. The main result is a strong law of large numbers for a re-scaled version of this quantity, which presents an explicit relation with the…
Here we deconstruct, and then in a reasoned way reconstruct, the concept of "entropy of a system," paying particular attention to where the randomness may be coming from. We start with the core concept of entropy as a COUNT associated with…
We introduce a novel model order reduction method for large-scale linear switched systems (LSS) where the coefficient matrices are affected by a low-rank switching. The key idea is to replace the LSS by a non-switched system with extended…
The formation of sentences is a highly structured and history-dependent process. The probability of using a specific word in a sentence strongly depends on the 'history' of word-usage earlier in that sentence. We study a simple…
Motivated by an application of eliciting users' preferences, we investigate the problem of learning hemimetrics, i.e., pairwise distances among a set of $n$ items that satisfy triangle inequalities and non-negativity constraints. In our…
Given a probability distribution P, what is the minimum amount of bits needed to store a value x sampled according to P, such that x can later be recovered (except with some small probability)? Or, what is the maximum amount of uniform…
Many biological systems perform close to their physical limits, but promoting this optimality to a general principle seems to require implausibly fine tuning of parameters. Using examples from a wide range of systems, we show that this…
How hard is it guess a password? Massey showed that that the Shannon entropy of the distribution from which the password is selected is a lower bound on the expected number of guesses, but one which is not tight in general. In a series of…
Recommendations based on behavioral data may be faced with ambiguous statistical evidence. We consider the case of association rules, relevant e.g.~for query and product recommendations. For example: Suppose that a customer belongs to…
Regularization occurs when the output a learner produces is less variable than the linguistic data they observed. In an artificial language learning experiment, we show that there exist at least two independent sources of regularization…
The structure of a sentence can be represented as a network where vertices are words and edges indicate syntactic dependencies. Interestingly, crossing syntactic dependencies have been observed to be infrequent in human languages. This…
Simplicity bias is an intriguing phenomenon prevalent in various input-output maps, characterized by a preference for simpler, more regular, or symmetric outputs. Notably, these maps typically feature high-probability outputs with simple…
There is a great deal of work in cognitive psychology, linguistics, and computer science, about using word (or phrase) frequencies in context in text corpora to develop measures for word similarity or word association, going back to at…
The average uncertainty associated with words is an information-theoretic concept at the heart of quantitative and computational linguistics. The entropy has been established as a measure of this average uncertainty - also called average…
In distortion-based analysis of social choice rules over metric spaces, one assumes that all voters and candidates are jointly embedded in a common metric space. Voters rank candidates by non-decreasing distance. The mechanism, receiving…
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…
Static word embedding is still useful, particularly for context-unavailable tasks, because in the case of no context available, pre-trained language models often perform worse than static word embeddings. Although dimension is a key factor…
Surprise describes a range of phenomena from unexpected events to behavioral responses. We propose a measure of surprise and use it for surprise-driven learning. Our surprise measure takes into account data likelihood as well as the degree…