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Related papers: Zipfian Whitening

200 papers

We study a deliberately simple, fully non-linguistic model of text: a sequence of independent draws from a finite alphabet of letters plus a single space symbol. A word is defined as a maximal block of non-space symbols. Within this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Vladimir Berman

Word embeddings are often criticized for capturing undesirable word associations such as gender stereotypes. However, methods for measuring and removing such biases remain poorly understood. We show that for any embedding model that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-08-20 Kawin Ethayarajh , David Duvenaud , Graeme Hirst

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Sonia Petrini , Antoni Casas-i-Muñoz , Jordi Cluet-i-Martinell , Mengxue Wang , Chris Bentz , Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

Recent research has shown that static word embeddings can encode word frequency information. However, little has been studied about this phenomenon and its effects on downstream tasks. In the present work, we systematically study the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-23 Francisco Valentini , Juan Cruz Sosa , Diego Fernandez Slezak , Edgar Altszyler

In this paper we combine statistical analysis of large text databases and simple stochastic models to explain the appearance of scaling laws in the statistics of word frequencies. Besides the sublinear scaling of the vocabulary size with…

Physics and Society · Physics 2014-11-05 Martin Gerlach , Eduardo G. Altmann

Causal processes can give rise to distinctive distributions in the linguistic variables that they affect. Consequently, a secure understanding of a variable's distribution can hold a key to understanding the forces that have causally shaped…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Jayden L. Macklin-Cordes , Erich R. Round

Zipf's law states that if words of language are ranked in the order of decreasing frequency in texts, the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. It is very robust as an experimental observation, but to date it escaped…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2009-01-22 Dmitrii Manin

We analyse correspondence of a text to a simple probabilistic model. The model assumes that the words are selected independently from an infinite dictionary. The probability distribution correspond to the Zipf---Mandelbrot law. We count…

We introduce a method for embedding words as probability densities in a low-dimensional space. Rather than assuming that a word embedding is fixed across the entire text collection, as in standard word embedding methods, in our Bayesian…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-06-12 Arthur Bražinskas , Serhii Havrylov , Ivan Titov

Understanding human language has been a sub-challenge on the way of intelligent machines. The study of meaning in natural language processing (NLP) relies on the distributional hypothesis where language elements get meaning from the words…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-06 Erhan Sezerer , Selma Tekir

Pre-training models such as BERT have achieved great success in many natural language processing tasks. However, how to obtain better sentence representation through these pre-training models is still worthy to exploit. Previous work has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Jianlin Su , Jiarun Cao , Weijie Liu , Yangyiwen Ou

This paper presents a whitening-based contrastive learning method for sentence embedding learning (WhitenedCSE), which combines contrastive learning with a novel shuffled group whitening. Generally, contrastive learning pulls distortions of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Wenjie Zhuo , Yifan Sun , Xiaohan Wang , Linchao Zhu , Yi Yang

The performance of sentence encoders can be significantly improved through the simple practice of fine-tuning using contrastive loss. A natural question arises: what characteristics do models acquire during contrastive learning? This paper…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Hiroto Kurita , Goro Kobayashi , Sho Yokoi , Kentaro Inui

We demonstrate that large texts, representing human (English, Russian, Ukrainian) and artificial (C++, Java) languages, display quantitative patterns characterized by the Benford-like and Zipf laws. The frequency of a word following the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-03-13 Evgeny Shulzinger , Irina Legchenkova , Edward Bormashenko

Zipf's law in language lacks a definitive origin, debated across fields. This study explains Zipf-like behavior using geometric mechanisms without linguistic elements. The Full Combinatorial Word Model (FCWM) forms words from a finite…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-27 Vladimir Berman

Despite being a paradigm of quantitative linguistics, Zipf's law for words suffers from three main problems: its formulation is ambiguous, its validity has not been tested rigorously from a statistical point of view, and it has not been…

Applications · Statistics 2016-02-17 Isabel Moreno-Sánchez , Francesc Font-Clos , Álvaro Corral

Word embeddings predict a word from its neighbours by learning small, dense embedding vectors. In practice, this prediction corresponds to a semantic score given to the predicted word (or term weight). We present a novel model that, given a…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Casper Hansen , Christian Hansen , Stephen Alstrup , Jakob Grue Simonsen , Christina Lioma

Zipf's law states that sequential frequencies of words in a text correspond to a power function. Its probabilistic model is an infinite urn scheme with asymptotically power distribution. The exponent of this distribution must be estimated.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-06-15 Mikhail Chebunin , Artyom Kovalevskii

Word embeddings have been shown to benefit from ensambling several word embedding sources, often carried out using straightforward mathematical operations over the set of word vectors. More recently, self-supervised learning has been used…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-01-27 James O' Neill , Danushka Bollegala

We present a clustering-based language model using word embeddings for text readability prediction. Presumably, an Euclidean semantic space hypothesis holds true for word embeddings whose training is done by observing word co-occurrences.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-09-07 Miriam Cha , Youngjune Gwon , H. T. Kung