Related papers: Simple stochastic processes behind Menzerath's Law
Zipf's law of abbreviation, the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter, is one of the most solid candidates for a linguistic universal, in the sense that it has the potential for being exceptionless or with a number of exceptions…
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…
In this paper we introduce a general stochastic representation for an important class of processes with resetting. It allows to describe any stochastic process intermittently terminated and restarted from a predefined random or non-random…
Empirical evidence shows that the rate of irregular usage of English verbs exhibits discontinuity as a function of their frequency: the most frequent verbs tend to be totally irregular. We aim to qualitatively understand the origin of this…
The coalgebraic modelling of alternating automata and of probabilistic automata has long been obstructed by the absence of distributive laws of the powerset monad over itself, respectively of the powerset monad over the finite distribution…
Recent research in computational linguistics has developed algorithms which associate matrices with adjectives and verbs, based on the distribution of words in a corpus of text. These matrices are linear operators on a vector space of…
A stochastic model for intermittent fluctuations due to a super-position of uncorrelated Lorentzian pulses is presented. For constant pulse duration, this is shown to result in an exponential power spectral density for the stationary…
Much recent work has shown how cross-linguistic variation is constrained by competing pressures from efficient communication. However, little attention has been paid to the role of the systematicity of forms (regularity), a key property of…
We investigate a generalized stochastic model with the property known as mean reversion, that is, the tendency to relax towards a historical reference level. Besides this property, the dynamics is driven by multiplicative and additive…
This work faces the problem of the origin of the logarithmic character of the Gompertzian growth. We show that the macroscopic, deterministic Gompertz equation describes the evolution from the initial state to the final stationary value of…
Probabilistic word embeddings have shown effectiveness in capturing notions of generality and entailment, but there is very little work on doing the analogous type of investigation for sentences. In this paper we define probabilistic models…
Natural data is often organized as a hierarchical composition of features. How many samples do generative models need in order to learn the composition rules, so as to produce a combinatorially large number of novel data? What signal in the…
Stochastic modeling of transcription is a classic yet long-standing problem in theoretical biophysics. The lack of unified results and a computationally efficient approach for a general, fine-grained transcription model has confined…
The analysis of strings of $n$ random variables with geometric distribution has recently attracted renewed interest: Archibald et al. consider the number of distinct adjacent pairs in geometrically distributed words. They obtain the…
Statistical models of economic distributions lead to Boltzmann distributions rather than a Pareto power law. This result is supported by two facts: 1. the distributions of income, car sales, marriages or jobs are a matter of chances and…
A key barrier to making phonetic studies scalable and replicable is the need to rely on subjective, manual annotation. To help meet this challenge, a machine learning algorithm was developed for automatic measurement of a widely used…
We consider the almost sure asymptotic behavior of the periodogram of stationary and ergodic sequences. Under mild conditions we establish that the limsup of the periodogram properly normalized identifies almost surely the spectral density…
We propose a stochastic model to study phonetic changes as an evolutionary process driven by social interactions between two groups of individuals with different phonological systems. Particularly, we focus on the changes in the place of…
We introduce a simple stochastic system able to generate anomalous diffusion both for position and velocity. The model represents a viable description of the Fermi's acceleration mechanism and it is amenable to analytical treatment through…
For general repeated measures designs the Wald-type statistic (WTS) is an asymptotically valid procedure allowing for unequal covariance matrices and possibly non-normal multivariate observations. The drawback of this procedure is the poor…