Related papers: Quantifying patterns of punctuation in modern Chin…
The celebrated proverb that "speech is silver, silence is golden" has a long multinational history and multiple specific meanings. In written texts punctuation can in fact be considered one of its manifestations. Indeed, the virtue of…
As the recent studies indicate, the structure imposed onto written texts by the presence of punctuation develops patterns which reveal certain characteristics of universality. In particular, based on a large collection of classic literary…
The complexity characteristics of texts written in natural languages are significantly related to the rules of punctuation. In particular, the distances between punctuation marks measured by the number of words quite universally follow the…
Complex networks provide powerful tools for analyzing and understanding the intricate structures present in various systems, including natural language. Here, we analyze topology of growing word-adjacency networks constructed from Chinese…
From a grammar point of view, the role of punctuation marks in a sentence is formally defined and well understood. In semantic analysis punctuation plays also a crucial role as a method of avoiding ambiguity of the meaning. A different…
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…
We collect 14 representative corpora for major periods in Chinese history in this study. These corpora include poetic works produced in several dynasties, novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties, and essays and news reports written in modern…
Corpus-based statistical analysis plays a significant role in linguistic research, and ample evidence has shown that different languages exhibit some common laws. Studies have found that letters in some alphabetic writing languages have…
It was only until the 20th century when the Chinese language began using punctuation. In fact, many ancient Chinese texts contain thousands of lines with no distinct punctuation marks or delimiters in sight. The lack of punctuation in such…
The distribution of intertrade durations, defined as the waiting times between two consecutive transactions, is investigated based upon the limit order book data of 23 liquid Chinese stocks listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in the whole…
Background: Zipf's discovery that word frequency distributions obey a power law established parallels between biological and physical processes, and language, laying the groundwork for a complex systems perspective on human communication.…
Zipf's law on word frequency is observed in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and so on, yet it does not hold for Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters. A model for writing process is proposed to explain the above difference, which takes…
This study re-evaluates the assumption that long-range correlations in sentence length are a fundamental feature of natural language and a marker of literary style. While previous research has suggested that punctuation marks--particularly…
We show that the Zipf's law for Chinese characters perfectly holds for sufficiently short texts (few thousand different characters). The scenario of its validity is similar to the Zipf's law for words in short English texts. For long…
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…
The distribution of word probabilities in the monkey model of Zipf's law is associated with two universality properties: (1) the power law exponent converges strongly to $-1$ as the alphabet size increases and the letter probabilities are…
One of the ultimate goals for linguists is to find universal properties in human languages. Although words are generally considered as representing arbitrary mapping between linguistic forms and meanings, we propose a new universal law that…
Quantitative linguistics has provided us with a number of empirical laws that characterise the evolution of languages and competition amongst them. In terms of language usage, one of the most influential results is Zipf's law of word…
Chinese word segmentation is a foundational task in natural language processing (NLP), with far-reaching effects on syntactic analysis. Unlike alphabetic languages like English, Chinese lacks explicit word boundaries, making segmentation…
Zipf's law is the main regularity of quantitative linguistics. Despite of many works devoted to foundations of this law, it is still unclear whether it is only a statistical regularity, or it has deeper relations with information-carrying…