Related papers: A complexity measure for diachronic Chinese phonol…
Languages evolve over time in a process in which reproduction, mutation and extinction are all possible, similar to what happens to living organisms. Using this similarity it is possible, in principle, to build family trees which show the…
This work proposes a tentative model for the calculation of dimensionless distances between phonemes; sounds are described with binary distinctive features and distances show linear consistency in terms of such features. The model can be…
We show that short-range phoneme dependencies encode large-scale patterns of linguistic relatedness, with direct implications for quantitative typology and evolutionary linguistics. Specifically, using an information-theoretic framework, we…
We introduce a new measure on regular languages: their nondeterministic syntactic complexity. It is the least degree of any extension of the `canonical boolean representation' of the syntactic monoid. Equivalently, it is the least number of…
Phonetic ambiguity and confusibility are bugbears for any form of bottom-up or data-driven approach to language processing. The question of when an input is ``close enough'' to a target word pervades the entire problem spaces of speech…
We present methods for calculating a measure of phonotactic complexity---bits per phoneme---that permits a straightforward cross-linguistic comparison. When given a word, represented as a sequence of phonemic segments such as symbols in 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…
In this paper we examine the usefulness of two classes of algorithms Distance Methods, Discrete Character Methods (Felsenstein and Felsenstein 2003) widely used in genetics, for predicting the family relationships among a set of related…
The idea that the distance among pairs of languages can be evaluated from lexical differences seems to have its roots in the work of the French explorer Dumont D'Urville. He collected comparative words lists of various languages during his…
The idea of measuring distance between languages seems to have its roots in the work of the French explorer Dumont D'Urville \cite{Urv}. He collected comparative words lists of various languages during his voyages aboard the Astrolabe from…
Deterministic automata have been traditionally studied through the point of view of language equivalence, but another perspective is given by the canonical notion of shortest-distinguishing-word distance quantifying the of states.…
Compositionality in language refers to how much the meaning of some phrase can be decomposed into the meaning of its constituents and the way these constituents are combined. Based on the premise that substitution by synonyms is…
We present ZhoBLiMP, the largest linguistic minimal pair benchmark for Chinese, with over 100 paradigms, ranging from topicalization to the \textit{Ba} construction. We then train from scratch a suite of Chinese language models (LMs) with…
The idea of measuring distance between languages seems to have its roots in the work of the French explorer Dumont D'Urville (D'Urville 1832). He collected comparative words lists of various languages during his voyages aboard the Astrolabe…
A measure of complexity based on a probabilistic description of physical systems is proposed. This measure incorporates the main features of the intuitive notion of such a magnitude. It can be applied to many physical situations and to…
It is often stated that human languages, as other biological systems, are shaped by cost-cutting pressures but, to what extent? Attempts to quantify the degree of optimality of languages by means of an optimality score have been scarce and…
Many studies have shown that human languages tend to optimize for lower complexity and increased communication efficiency. Syntactic dependency distance, which measures the linear distance between dependent words, is often considered a key…
We propose novel algorithms for sequence prediction based on ideas from stringology. These algorithms are time and space efficient and satisfy mistake bounds related to particular stringological complexity measures of the sequence. In this…
Analogical reasoning is effective in capturing linguistic regularities. This paper proposes an analogical reasoning task on Chinese. After delving into Chinese lexical knowledge, we sketch 68 implicit morphological relations and 28 explicit…
This work addresses the problem of computing measures of recognisable sets of infinite trees. An algorithm is provided to compute the probability measure of a tree language recognisable by a weak alternating automaton, or equivalently…