Related papers: Core Lexicon and Contagious Words
Inflection graphs are highly complex networks representing relationships between inflectional forms of words in human languages. For so-called synthetic languages, such as Latin or Polish, they have particularly interesting structure due to…
Our languages are in constant flux driven by external factors such as cultural, societal and technological changes, as well as by only partially understood internal motivations. Words acquire new meanings and lose old senses, new words are…
What statistical properties might support learning abstract grammatical knowledge from linear input? We address this question by examining the statistical distribution of function words. Function words have been argued to aid acquisition…
This paper explores two separate questions: Can we perform natural language processing tasks without a lexicon?; and, Should we? Existing natural language processing techniques are either based on words as units or use units such as grams…
Cosine similarity of contextual embeddings is used in many NLP tasks (e.g., QA, IR, MT) and metrics (e.g., BERTScore). Here, we uncover systematic ways in which word similarities estimated by cosine over BERT embeddings are understated and…
This paper analysed author-assigned and title keywords into constituent words collected from 769 articles published in the journal Low Temperature Physics since the year 2006 to 2010. The total number of distinct keywords over the said time…
The Zipf's law is the major regularity of statistical linguistics that served as a prototype for rank-frequency relations and scaling laws in natural sciences. Here we show that the Zipf's law -- together with its applicability for a single…
The monitoring of event frequencies can be used to recognize behavioral anomalies, to identify trends, and to deduce or discard hypotheses about the underlying system. For example, the performance of a web server may be monitored based on…
We present an automated pipeline for estimating Verb Frame Frequencies (VFFs), the frequency with which a verb appears in particular syntactic frames. VFFs provide a powerful window into syntax in both human and machine language systems,…
Distributional learning provides a framework for studying the learnability of structured languages from positive data. In this paper, we extend this framework to graph languages generated by fixed-interface clause systems. We formulate…
Lexical resources are crucial for cross-linguistic analysis and can provide new insights into computational models for natural language learning. Here, we present an advanced database for comparative studies of words with multiple meanings,…
In this paper we will look at the distribution with which passwords are chosen. Zipf's Law is commonly observed in lists of chosen words. Using password lists from four different on-line sources, we will investigate if Zipf's law is a good…
Neural language models learn, to varying degrees of accuracy, the grammatical properties of natural languages. In this work, we investigate whether there are systematic sources of variation in the language models' accuracy. Focusing on…
We introduce FiLex, a self-reinforcing stochastic process which models finite lexicons in emergent language experiments. The central property of FiLex is that it is a self-reinforcing process, parallel to the intuition that the more a word…
We point out that the functional form describing the frequency of sizes of events in complex systems (e.g. earthquakes, forest fires, bursts of neuronal activity) can be obtained from maximal likelihood inference, which, remarkably, only…
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…
One of the major sources of trending news, events and opinion in the current age is micro blogging. Twitter, being one of them, is extensively used to mine data about public responses and event updates. This paper intends to propose methods…
Lexical substitutes have found use in areas such as paraphrasing, text simplification, machine translation, word sense disambiguation, and part of speech induction. However the computational complexity of accurately identifying the most…
Word similarities affect language acquisition and use in a multi-relational way barely accounted for in the literature. We propose a multiplex network representation of this mental lexicon of word similarities as a natural framework for…
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…