Related papers: Statistical laws and linguistics inform meaning in…
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.…
Methods and insights from statistical physics are finding an increasing variety of applications where one seeks to understand the emergent properties of a complex interacting system. One such area concerns the dynamics of language at a…
We study the relationship between vocabulary size and text length in a corpus of $75$ literary works in English, authored by six writers, distinguishing between the contributions of three grammatical classes (or ``tags,'' namely, {\it…
Scaling properties of language are a useful tool for understanding generative processes in texts. We investigate the scaling relations in citywise Twitter corpora coming from the Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas of the United…
The dependence with text length of the statistical properties of word occurrences has long been considered a severe limitation quantitative linguistics. We propose a simple scaling form for the distribution of absolute word frequencies…
Natural language exhibits statistical dependencies at a wide range of scales. For instance, the mutual information between words in natural language decays like a power law with the temporal lag between them. However, many statistical…
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…
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…
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…
The Zipf's law establishes that if the words of a (large) text are ordered by decreasing frequency, the frequency versus the rank decreases as a power law with exponent close to $-1$. Previous work has stressed that this pattern arises from…
We use the formulation of equilibrium statistical mechanics in order to study some important characteristics of language. Using a simple expression for the Hamiltonian of a language system, which is directly implied by the Zipf law, we are…
Statistical regularities in human language have fascinated researchers for decades, suggesting deep underlying principles governing its evolution and information structuring for efficient communication. While Zipf's Law describes the…
Linguistic laws constitute one of the quantitative cornerstones of modern cognitive sciences and have been routinely investigated in written corpora, or in the equivalent transcription of oral corpora. This means that inferences of…
Conversations allow the quick transfer of short bits of information and it is reasonable to expect that changes in communication medium affect how we converse. Using conversations in works of fiction and in an online social networking…
Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (e.g., time, space, color, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
Human language, the most powerful communication system in history, is closely associated with cognition. Written text is one of the fundamental manifestations of language, and the study of its universal regularities can give clues about how…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…
The complexity of human interactions with social and natural phenomena is mirrored in the way we describe our experiences through natural language. In order to retain and convey such a high dimensional information, the statistical…