Related papers: US Code growth 1991-2025
The United States Code (Code) is a document containing over 22 million words that represents a large and important source of Federal statutory law. Scholars and policy advocates often discuss the direction and magnitude of changes in…
As societies confront increasingly complex regulatory demands in domains such as digital governance, climate policy, and public health, there is a pressing need to understand how legal systems evolve, where they concentrate regulatory…
With Zipf's law being originally and most famously observed for word frequency, it is surprisingly limited in its applicability to human language, holding over no more than three to four orders of magnitude before hitting a clear break in…
By determining which were the most common English words and phrases since the beginning of the 16th century, we obtain a unique large-scale view of the evolution of written text. We find that the most common words and phrases in any given…
It is well-known that most users do not read privacy policies, but almost all users tick the box to agree with them. In this paper, we analyze the 25-year history of privacy policies using methods from transparency research, machine…
To uncover underlying mechanism of collective human dynamics, we survey more than 1.8 billion blog entries and observe the statistical properties of word appearances. We focus on words that show dynamic growth and decay with a tendency to…
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…
Human language, as a typical complex system, its organization and evolution is an attractive topic for both physical and cultural researchers. In this paper, we present the first exhaustive analysis of the text organization of human speech.…
We analyze the occurrence frequencies of over 15 million words recorded in millions of books published during the past two centuries in seven different languages. For all languages and chronological subsets of the data we confirm that two…
Judicial opinions once considered sound can lose relevance over time. Yet, little has been known, both systematically and at scale, about how judicial reasoning has evolved. Here, we analyze four million US court decisions from 1800 to…
For every natural number $n\geq 2$ and every finite sequence $L$ of natural numbers, we consider the set $UD_n(L)$ of all uniquely decodable codes over an $n$-letter alphabet with the sequence $L$ as the sequence of code word lengths, as…
Dynamics of average length of words in Russian and English is analysed in the article. Words belonging to the diachronic text corpus Google Books Ngram and dated back to the last two centuries are studied. It was found out that average word…
We investigate the number of sets of words that can be formed from a finite alphabet, counted by the total length of the words in the set. An explicit expression for the counting sequence is derived from the generating function, and…
Out of nearly 70,000 bills introduced in the U.S. Congress from 2001 to 2015, only 2,513 were enacted. We developed a machine learning approach to forecasting the probability that any bill will become law. Starting in 2001 with the 107th…
We propose a stochastic model for the number of different words in a given database which incorporates the dependence on the database size and historical changes. The main feature of our model is the existence of two different classes of…
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…
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 dependence of the frequency distributions due to multiple meanings of words in a text is investigated by deleting letters. By coding the words with fewer letters the number of meanings per coded word increases. This increase is measured…
The avoidability, or unavoidability of patterns in words over finite alphabets has been studied extensively. A word (pattern) over a finite set is said to be unavoidable if, for all but finitely many words, there exists a morphism mapping…
This study presents a fascinating linguistic property related to the number of letters in words and their corresponding numerical values. By selecting any arbitrary word, counting its constituent letters, and subsequently spelling out the…